Well, maybe. Check out:  https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/solar-roadways#home

It’s an interesting idea, and certainly has at least some applications. But there are some questions:

• How will it survive heavy truck traffic? Big trucks pay a lot in road taxes because they cause that vast majority of wear and tear on highways. They break concrete; won’t they also break glass, even strong glass?
• What about cost? Current solar cell prices are around a dollar per rated watt of nominal capacity. This works out to around $15-$20 per square foot, or for two lanes of Interstate, over $2.2 million per mile, just for the panel.
• A solar cell parking lot is a clever idea, except that when cars are parked there, they shade the cells. Using them for, say, an apartment parking lot, which is likely to be empty during the day, is a good idea. Using them for a shopping center, not so much.

Plans2Reality made a donation. Heck, we’re dreamers; we worked hard to explain the advantage of Solyndra’s tubular design to the marketplace, with some success.

And they’re may be niche markets for it. What about airports? Lots of concrete, no shade. Even if it’s not strong enough for runways, it would be great for taxiways, gates, etc. And the built-in lighting ought to be very useful. So, good luck to them!

On April 12 and 13, Plans2Reality LLC will field its two-bike racing team at the Mojave Mile Top Speed Shootout – “The Fastest Mile in the West”. Riders compete for the fastest top speed in a standing-start mile.

What does motorsport racing have to do with technology marketing? A lot, actually. Building a competitive machine for any type of motorsport competition requires top-shelf technology, but it also requires that you deliver in a timely manner. No one cares how fast your car is if it is not ready in time for the start of the race. Designing and building a competitive vehicle strengthens “agile” development as well; one must be in a continuous cycle of test, improve, test again, while at the same time always hitting your major “release dates” (read “start of the race”).

So, wish us luck, and check back next week for pictures and videos.

Special thanks to Design Group C for construction help and Tracy at Social Strand Media (http://socialstrand.com) for promotional tips.

Does DITA have drawbacks? Yes, of course.

• It’s more complex than most typical wiki makeup languages. To some extent, this is a reflection of its power, but it also means that casual users can really hurt themselves.
• DITA output must be created – compiled, in effect – using some fairly complex compilers. Again, this is to some extent the source of DITA’s power, but it also means that you need a person skilled in developing and maintaining the DITA compiler.
• You are going to have hundreds of DITA files, so you are going to need some sort of source-code repository system. This can be GIT or SVN, but you may need more.
• DITA is very aware of the ‘elements’ within each DITA topic, so to get the full advantage of DITA, you need a way to track and manage element IDs. Content Management systems exist to do this, but they are expensive and require their own level of expertise.
• So-called DITA-aware editors are available, but many of them cost several hundred dollars per seat. (There are plug-ins for Eclipse that handle DITA fairly well, and are free.)

Should your organization be using DITA? It depends on your goals and needs. We’ll dig into this in the next post.

In our last post, “Do You Need DITA?”, we looked at what DITA was. Next, we will look at its advantages.

• It’s probably the best method available today for creating content that needs to appears in different formats, e.g. PDF, web, mobile, etc. Commands are available to choose between long-form and short-form names based on the available display area. For example, a pop-up might say simply “DITA”, while a PDF might say “Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA)”
• It reduces translation costs. Because it is extremely modular, only changed DITA files need to be re-translated. Updates to the primary-language content (e.g., English) trigger translation only for files that have changed. Furthermore, DITA supports certain types of do-not-translate and lock functions, to further minimize the amount of translation to be done.
• It supports content re-use. Several techniques are available to let you standardize chunks of content, (e.g. notes and warnings, boilerplate) and yet also customize re-use. For example, a set of instructions common to a range of products can be written once, with specific product nomenclature added automatically.
• It is highly structured, and more-or-less forces authors to follow specific templates and structures. You cannot, for example, digress into theory in the middle of a sequence or steps.
• Each ‘element’ in DITA content has an identifying label. This gives you very fine-grained control of content re-use. (An element can be a simple as a word or phrase, a step, a figure, a sequence of steps – almost anything, really.)

Are there drawbacks to DITA? Yes, of course. But that’s a topic for our next post.

DITA, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture, is an XML-based system for creating content that can easily be re-purposed for multiple output formats, that is, PDF, web, mobile, etc. Quite a few companies are using it. Should yours be one of them? This series of blog posts will look at the pros and cons of DITA.

What Is DITA?

DITA can be described as a strongly-typed language for expressing technical content in a highly modular way. It is semantic in nature; its meta-data describes the nature and purpose of all content, rather that how that content is to appear. In this regard, DITA is somewhat similar to DocBook, and different from HTML and most Wiki or web markup languages.

DITA strongly encourages you to write small, modular “topics”, then create your content by linking topics together using “maps”. Numerous conditional-compilation and output-format-specific options are available.

NEXT: The “pros” of DITA