Overview of the DITA 1.2 Specification: Technical Content

This section describes the DITA document types and specializations for technical content.

Prior to the release of DITA 1.2, the document types and specializations for technical content were included as an integral part of the base DITA specification. With the release of DITA 1.2, the document types and specializations for technical content have a dedicated section in the DITA specification. This change reflects the addition of an increasing number of specializations that are part of the DITA standard.

The document types and specializations included in the technical content package and described in this section were designed to meet the requirements of those authoring content for technically oriented products in which the concept, task, and reference information types provide the basis for the majority of the content. These information types are used by technical-communication and information-development organizations that provide procedures-oriented content to support the implementation and use of computer hardware, computer software, and machine-industry content. However, many other organizations producing policies and procedures, multi-component reports, and other business content also use the concept, task, and reference information types as essential to their information models.

The DITA 1.2 technical content package includes the following document types and supporting structural specializations and constraints:

Concept document type and structural specialization
Reference document type and structural specialization
Task document type (general task with the Strict Taskbody Constraint)
General task document type and specialization
Machinery task document type (general task with the Machinery Taskbody Constraint)
Glossary entry (glossentry) document type and structural specialization
Glossary group (glossgroup) document type and structural specialization
Bookmap document type and structural specialization

The DITA technical content package includes the following domain specializations:

Programming elements
Software elements
User interface elements
Task requirements elements
Extensible Name and Address Language (xNAL) elements
Abbreviated form element
Glossary reference (glossref) element

The DITA technical content package includes the following constraint modules:

Strict Taskbody
Machinery Taskbody

The technical content document type shells included in the DITA technical content package use information types included in other packages, and other packages use the information types from the technical content package.

The technical content package consists of the technicalContent, machineIndustry, and xnal directories, as well as the map document type but not the base map information types.

2.2.1 Overview of the DITA 1.2 Specification: Technical Content