Architectural specification: All-inclusive edition

Introduction to DITA
The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is an XML-based architecture for authoring, producing, and delivering topic-oriented, information-typed content that can be reused and single-sourced in a variety of ways. While DITA historically has been driven by the requirements of large-scale technical documentation authoring, management, and delivery, it is a standard that is applicable to any kind of publication or information that might be presented to readers, including interactive training and educational materials, standards, reports, business documents, trade books, travel and nature guides, and more.

DITA markup
Topics and maps are the basic building blocks of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). Metadata attributes and values can be added to DITA topics and maps, as well as to elements within topics, to allow for conditional publishing and content reuse.

DITA addressing
DITA provides two addressing mechanisms. DITA addresses either are direct URI-based addresses, or they are indirect key-based addresses. Within DITA documents, individual elements are addressed by unique identifiers specified on the @id attribute. DITA defines two fragment-identifier syntaxes; one is the full fragment-identifier syntax, and the other is an abbreviated fragment-identifier syntax that can be used when addressing non-topic elements from within the same topic.

DITA processing
DITA processing is affected by a number of factors, including attributes that indicate the set of vocabulary and constraint modules on which a DITA document depends; navigation; linking; content reuse (using direct or indirect addressing); conditional processing; branch filtering; chunking; and more. In addition, translation of DITA content is expedited through the use of the @dir, @translate, and @xml:lang attributes, and the <index-sort-as> element.

Configuration, specialization, generalization, and constraints
The extension facilities of DITA allow existing vocabulary and constraint modules to be combined to create specific DITA document types. Vocabulary modules also can be specialized to meet requirements that are not satisfied by existing markup.

Coding practices for DITA grammar files
This section collects all of the rules for creating modular DTD, RELAX NG, or XML Schema grammar files to represent DITA document types, specializations, and constraints.

Technical content specializations
This section contains information about the technical content specializations. It includes a summary of the document types and domains, as well as information about how the technical content specializations support authoring troubleshooting information.

Learning and training specializations
The section contains information about the learning and training specializations: Challenges faced by developers of instructional content; use cases; objectives of the specializations; information about the reusable learning-objects approach to learning and training content; summary of the topic types and domains; and more.