DITA has been designed to satisfy requirements for
information typing, semantic markup, modularity, reuse, interchange, and production of different
deliverable forms from a single source. These topics provide an overview of the key DITA
features and facilities that serve to satisfy these requirements.
- DITA topics
- In DITA, a topic is the basic unit of authoring
and reuse. All DITA topics have the same basic structure: a title and, optionally, a body
of content.
Topics can be generic or more specialized; specialized topics
represent more specific information types or semantic roles, for example,
<concept>, <task>,
<reference>, or
<learningContent>. See DITA topics for more
information.
- DITA maps
- DITA maps are documents that organize topics and
other resources into structured collections of information.
DITA maps specify hierarchy and the relationships among the
topics; they also provide the contexts in which
keys are defined and resolved. DITA maps SHOULD have .ditamap as
the file extension. See DITA maps
for more information.
- Information typing
- Information typing is the practice
of identifying types of topics, such as concept, reference,
and task, to clearly distinguish between different types of
information. Topics that answer different reader questions
(How ...? What is ...?) can be categorized with different
information types. The base information types provided by
DITA specializations (for example, technical content,
machine industry, and learning and training) provide starter
sets of information types that can be adopted immediately by
many technical and business-related organizations. See
Information
typing for more information.
- 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. See DITA addressing
for more information.
- Content reuse
- The DITA
@conref,
@conkeyref, @conrefend, and @conaction attributes provide mechanisms for reusing content within DITA topics
or maps. These mechanisms can be used both to pull and push content. See Content reuse for more
information
- Conditional processing
- Conditional processing, also
known as profiling, is the filtering or flagging of
information based on processing-time
criteria. See
Conditional
processing for more information.
- Configuration
- A document type shell is an XML grammar
file that specifies the elements and attributes that are allowed in a DITA document. The
document type shell integrates structural modules, domain modules, and constraint modules.
In addition, a document type shell specifies whether and how topics can nest. See Configuration for more
information.
- Specialization
- The specialization feature of DITA
allows for the creation of new element types and attributes that are explicitly and
formally derived from existing types. This facilitates interchange of conforming DITA
content and ensures a minimum level of common processing for all DITA content. It also
allows specialization-aware processors to add specialization-specific processing to
existing base processing. See Specialization for
more information.
- Constraints
- Constraint modules define additional
constraints for vocabulary modules in order to restrict
content models or attribute lists for specific element
types, remove certain extension elements from an integrated
domain module, or replace base element types with
domain-provided, extension element types. See Constraints for more
information.