What is DITA

Overview on DITA

DITA is 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.

DITA supports a unique transclusion mechanism that is validated under DTD processing rules: an element "can replace itself with the content of a like element elsewhere, either in the current topic or in a separate topic that shares the same content models. DITA's conref 'transclusion' mechanism is similar to the SGML conref mechanism, which uses an empty element as a reference to a complete element elsewhere. However, DITA requires that at least a minimal content model for the referencing element be present, and performs checks during processing to ensure that the replacement element is valid in its new context. This mechanism goes beyond standard XInclude, in that content can be incorporated only when it is equivalent: If there is a mismatch between the reusing and reused element types, the conref is not resolved. It also goes beyond standard entity reuse, in that it allows the reused content to be in a valid XML file with a DTD. The net result is that reused content gets validated at authoring time, rather than at reuse time, catching problems at their source." (Information from the following web address: http://xml.coverpages.org/dita.html#overview)

The <dita> element provides a top-level container for multiple topics when you create documents using the ditabase document type. The <dita> element lets you create any sequence of concept, task, and reference topics, and the ditabase document type lets you further nest these topic types inside each other. The <dita> element has no particular output implications; it simply allows you to create multiple topics of different types at the same level in a single document. For more information what elements are contained within the dita elment, you should visit http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.0/langspec/dita.html.

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