You can extend DITA to incorporate standard vocabularies for non-textual content, such
as MathML and SVG, as markup within DITA documents. This
is done by specializing the <foreign>
or <unknown>
elements.
There are three methods of incorporating foreign content into DITA.
<foreign>
or
<unknown>
element. This is the usual implementation.<foreign>
or
<unknown>
element. This affords more control over the
content.<foreign>
or
<unknown>
elements. If the non-DITA content has interoperability
or vocabulary naming issues such as those that are addressed by specialization in DITA,
they must be addressed by means that are appropriate to the non-DITA content.The <foreign>
or <unknown>
elements should
not be used to include textual content or metadata in DITA documents, except where such
content acts as an example or display, rather than as the primary content of a topic.
<foreign>
specializations.<foreign>
The following code sample shows how SVG markup can be included within the
<svgcontainer>
element, which is part of the SVG domain and a
specialization of the <foreign>
element.
<p>This is an ellipse:
<svg-container>
<svg:svg width="100%" height="100%" version="1.1"
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
<ellipse cx="300" cy="150" rx="200" ry="80"
style="fill:rgb(200,100,50);
stroke:rgb(0,0,100);stroke-width:2"/>
</svg:svg>
</svg-container>.
</p>
The following code sample, which is from the svgDomain.ent file, shows the domain declaration for the SVG domain.
<!-- ============================================================= -->
<!-- SVG DOMAIN ENTITIES -->
<!-- ============================================================= -->
<!-- SVG elements must be prefixed, otherwise they conflict with
existing DITA elements (e.g., <desc> and <title>.
-->
<!ENTITY % NS.prefixed "INCLUDE" >
<!ENTITY % SVG.prefix "svg" >
<!ENTITY % svg-d-foreign
"svg-container
"
>
<!ENTITY svg-d-att
"(topic svg-d)"
>
Note that the SVG-specific %SVG.prefix;
parameter entity
is declared. This establishes the default namespace prefix to be used for the SVG content
embedded with this domain. The namespace can be overridden in a document-type shell by
declaring the parameter entity before the reference to the
svgDomain.ent file. Other foreign domains might need similar entities when required by the new vocabulary.
For more information, see the svgDomain.mod file that is shipped with the OASIS DITA distributions. For an example of including the SVG domain in a document type shell, see task.dtd.