Assessing DITA as a foundation for XML implementation

Table of contents

Abstract

What is DITA?

Business case for DITA

Architecture overview

Implementing DITA versus implementing custom XML architecture

Resources

What is DITA?

The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is described by its creators as:

“…an architecture for creating topic-oriented, information-typed content that can be reused and single-sourced in a variety of ways. It is also an architecture for creating new information types and describing new information domains based on existing types and domains. This allows groups to create very specific, targeted document type definitions using a process called specialization, while still sharing common output transforms and design rules developed for more general types and domains.” (http://xml.coverpages.org/dita.html#overview)

DITA includes several components:

Document type definitions (DTD), which define the structure of DITA files.
Open Toolkit, which provides a set of files to create output from DITA XML content. The Open Toolkit is made up mostly of Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) transformation files (to produce HTML output, for example) and XSL-FO (formatting objects) transformation files for generation of Portable Document Format (PDF) files.
Documentation, which describes the element set and their relationships.

DITA is intended as a starting point or a foundation for XML authoring, and it includes several interesting features to support customization. (http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=dita)

Originally developed by IBM, DITA is now an open source standard managed by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) and is available for download from the OASIS web site.

The basic information unit in DITA is the topic. Topics are assembled into deliverables, such as books or help systems, using map files. Each map file describes a sequence of topics and their hierarchical relationship. Transforming the map file results in the final deliverable format.

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Business case for DITA