About the DITA 1.1 Specification

The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) 1.1 specification defines both a) a set of document types for authoring and organizing topic-oriented information; and b) a set of mechanisms for combining and extending document types using a process called specialization.

The specification consists of:

This document is part of the technical specification for the DITA architecture. While the specification does contain some introductory information, it is not intended as an introduction to DITA nor as a users guide. The intended audience of this specification consists of implementers of the DITA standard, including tool developers and specializers.

Changes since DITA 1.0

The DITA 1.1 specification is designed to be backwards-compatible with 1.0-conforming applications. The following major changes to the architecture provide added functionality for 1.1:
  • A <bookmap> specialization for encoding book-specific information in a DITA map
  • A <glossentry> specialization for glossary entries
  • Indexing specializations for see, see-also, page ranges, and sort order
  • Improvements to graphic scaling capability
  • Improved short description flexibility through a new <abstract> element
  • Specialization support for new global attributes, such as conditional processing attributes
  • Support for integration of existing content structures through the <foreign> element
  • Support for new kinds of information and structures through the <data> and <unknown> elements
  • Formalization of conditional processing profiles

Editors


Members of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee


Special thanks

Special thanks to Robert Anderson of IBM for his work on improving the language reference through document generation processes and through editing of topics to incorporate numerous review comments.

Special thanks to Jeff Ogden of PTC for his numerous detailed reviews of both the language specification and architectural specification, which has resulted in a large number of editorial improvements.

History

2004-04-12 OASIS DITA Technical Committee formed with initial submission of materials from IBM
2005-06-01 OASIS DITA 1.0 specification approved by OASIS

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OASIS DITA Architectural Specification v1.1 -- Committee Draft 02, 8 May 2007
Copyright © OASIS Open 2005, 2007. All Rights Reserved.