Introduction

The design of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is based on deriving multiple information types, or topic types, from a common, generic topic. This language reference describes the elements that comprise the topic DTD and its initial, information-typed descendents: concept, reference, task, and glossentry. It also describes the DITA map DTD and its current specialization (bookmap), as well as various topic and map based DITA domains.

This specification describes specific details of each element in the OASIS DITA language. The separate DITA Architectural Specification includes detailed information about DITA specialization, when to use each topic type, how topics and maps interact, details of complex behaviors such as conref and conditional processing, and many other best practices for working with DITA.

The elements that make up the DITA design represent a set of different authoring concerns, each of which is grouped into its own chapter. Major sections include:

The main components of a topic, concept, reference, task, document,
The main components of a glossentry document (new for DITA 1.1),
The common elements available for creating content within the body of a topic,
The elements that make up the two types of tables in DITA,
The elements contained in the prolog of a topic (many of these also appear in the topicmeta in a map),
The elements contained in the related-links part of a topic,
Elements that appear in many contexts, but do not fit into specific categories,
Elements that are available for further specialization,
Domain specializations of topic elements that represent different subject domains,
Elements that make up a DITA map, followed by the "mapgroup" domain specialization,
The bookmap specialization (new for DITA 1.1),
The xNAL domain for describing author information (based on the extensible Name and Address Language standard, and also new for DITA 1.1),
The DITAVAL DTD for flagging and filtering content (formalized for DITA 1.1),
and commonly referenced descriptions

In addition to glossentry topics, bookmap, the xNAL domain, and the formalized DITAVAL format, DITA 1.1 also includes a new indexing domain, clarifications to the image and object elements, new props and base attributes for attribute specialization, and several new elements:

abstract
data and data-about
foreign and unknown
index-base

DITA 1.1 includes a new "dir" attribute to aid in localization. This attribute, along with other localization attributes, is now available on nearly every DITA element. In addition, common metadata and id attributes that were available on many elements in DITA 1.0 are now available on nearly every element.

Terminology

The key words “MUST”, “MUST NOT”, “REQUIRED”, “SHALL”, “SHALL NOT”, “SHOULD”, “SHOULD NOT”, “RECOMMENDED”, “MAY”, and “OPTIONAL” are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].

Normative References

[RFC2119]: S. Bradner, Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels, http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.txt, IETF RFC 2119, March 1997.