Lightweight DITA

In July 2014, the OASIS DITA Technical Committee formed the Lightweight DITA subcommittee, chaired by Michael Priestley of IBM.

The goal of the Lightweight DITA effort is to develop a specification for a lightweight architecture that will ease implementation by vendors and adoption by users. The architecture will provide:

• Easy out-of-the box authoring for common topic types
• Out-of-the-box mappings and specifications for authoring the common topic types in other formats, such as HTML5 and Markdown
• Easy assembly of new specializations from existing section types
• Easy creation of new specializations by generating them from a topic type designed for specialization creation

DITA 2.0

While work on DITA 2.0 is in the very early stages, there is general consensus among the DITA Technical Committee on the following points:

Architectural redesign

DITA 2.0 will provide an opportunity for the DITA Technical Committee to revisit and redesign aspects of the architecture that are less than optimal, such as chunking.

Backwards compatibility

DITA 2.0 will not be backwards compatible. Throughout the DITA 1.x releases, the DITA Technical Committee has gone to great pains to ensure that it did not add designs or features that might break existing implementations. For DITA 2.0, the DITA Technical Committee plans to relax this restriction, so that it can revisit some early design choices and remove deprecated elements. The DITA Technical Committee will minimize disruption and provide clear, documented migration paths to ease transition to DITA 2.0.

Modularity

The DITA Technical Committee plans to continue the practice of designing increasingly targeted releases and editions.

Topics

The technical content edition includes these technical-content topic types:

Composite

The composite topic (sometimes called ditabase) can contain other topic types. In the out-of-the-box OASIS distribution, it can contain topic, task, concept, reference, troubleshooting, glossentry, and glossgroup. These topics can be in any sequence.

Concept

A specialized topic that provides conceptual information. Conceptual information provides the background knowledge that enables readers to understand why they might need to perform a particular task or use a particular product. It might include extended definitions or explanations.

Glossary entry

A specialized topic that defines a term. It also can identify the part of speech and provide information about usage, acronyms, abbreviations, variant terms, synonyms, and associated symbols or graphics.

Glossary group

A specialized topic that can contain multiple glossary entry topics.

Machine industry task

A specialized topic that can be used to document tasks that involve machines or hardware. It can contain additional information about required personnel, safety conditions, support equipment, necessary supplies, and spare parts.

Reference

A specialized topic that provides facts that support a task, such as hardware specifications, required equipment, programming syntax, command-line interface parameters, or other information that might need to be accessed infrequently as a person performs a task.

Task and General task

The (strict) task is a specialized topic that provides step-by-step instruction about how to perform an action, plus brief information about when, where, why, and by whom the action is performed.

The general task has a looser content model than the task topic type, and it can be useful for migrating legacy content to DITA.

Topic

The document type that is the basic unit of authoring and reuse. In addition to the domains that are included in the base topic, this document type also includes domains that are useful for technical content.

Troubleshooting

A specialized topic that provides corrective action information such as troubleshooting and alarm clearing.

Maps

The technical content edition includes these technical-content map types:

Book map

A specialized map that can be used to produce book-oriented publications. Book maps enable authors to organize content into front matter, prefaces, chapters, parts, back matter, and more. In addition, they also include a set of metadata elements that can capture information about the book.

Classification map

A specialized map that can be used to associate subjects defined in a subject scheme map with topics referenced in a DITA map.

Map

The document type that organizes topics and other resources into structured collections of information. It specifies hierarchy and the relationships between the resources. In addition to the domains that are included in the base map, this document type also includes domains that are useful for technical content.

Topics

The all-inclusive edition includes these learning and training topic types:

Learning assessment

A specialized topic that presents assessment items to measure progress, encourage retrieval, and stimulate reinforcement of the learning content. Although it includes structure for objectives, duration, interaction and summary, the primary use is to contain interactions. The OASIS-defined interaction types are: True/False, single select, multiple select, sequencing, matching, hotspot and open question (essay). When sequenced in a learning map, such material can be organized into quizzes, tests or exams and presented before the content as a pre-assessment or after the content as a post-assessment checkpoint or test.

Note: Any DITA topic type can be configured to include assessment items. This makes it possible to include quiz items directly in a learning content topic or in a prerequisite section of a task topic, for example.

Learning base

A topic that provides the set of common elements that are used in the other learning topic types. This topic also provides a base for creating additional specialized topics for learning content. For example, a DITA practitioner can specialize learning base to create a structure for exercises.

Learning content

A specialized topic that provides learning content and includes structure for introduction, challenge, instruction, objectives, and duration. A learning content topic also can directly reuse content from other content (including task, concept, and reference topics) that supports the objectives declared in the learning overview.

Learning overview

A specialized topic that introduces a set of learning content and identifies the learning objectives and other information that might be helpful to the learner, such as prerequisites, duration, intended audience, and useful resources.

Learning plan

A specialized topic that describes learning needs and goals, instructional design models, task analyses, learning taxonomies, and other information that might be useful in the lesson planning process.

Learning summary

A specialized topic that recaps content and provides context, guidance, and additional resources to reinforce learning and long-term memory. Specifically, it includes structure for summary, objectives, review, next steps, and useful resources.

Maps

The all-inclusive edition includes these learning and training maps:

Learning book map

A specialized book map that includes specialized topic references to organize and sequence learning content for book-oriented publications. It extends the book structure provided in the technical-content book map to include learning metadata in the book map metadata, references to learning object and learning groups, and references to learning object and learning group maps.

Learning group map

A specialized map that stores a discrete set of related learning objects as a separate object. You can reference learning group maps from other learning group maps, learning maps, or learning book maps.

Learning object map

A specialized map that stores a discrete set of learning content to support learning objectives as separate objects. You can reference learning object maps from learning group maps, learning maps, or learning book maps.

Learning map

A specialized map that includes specialized topic references to organize and sequence content as learning objects and learning groups for non-book-oriented learning delivery. It extends the map structure provided in the technical-content map to include learning metadata in the map metadata, references to learning object and learning groups, and references to learning object and learning group maps.

Learning metadata

The all-inclusive edition also includes specialized DITA metadata that can be used to specify characteristics of the learning content. This learning metadata is modeled on industry standards; it is available for use in both the learning topics and learning maps.