2.1.1 Introduction to DITA

The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is an XML-based architecture for authoring, producing, and delivering topic-oriented, information-typed content that can be reused and single-sourced in a variety of ways. While DITA historically has been driven by the requirements of large-scale technical documentation authoring, management, and delivery, it is a standard that is applicable to any kind of publication or information that might be presented to readers, including interactive training and educational materials, standards, reports, business documents, trade books, travel and nature guides, and more.

DITA is designed for creating new document types and describing new information domains based on existing types and domains. The process for creating new types and domains is called specialization. Specialization enables the creation of very specific, targeted document-type definitions that still can share the common output transformations and design rules developed for more general types and domains; this is similar to how classes in an object-oriented system can inherit the methods of ancestor classes.

Because DITA topics are XML conforming, they can be readily viewed, edited, and validated using standard XML tools, although realizing the full potential of DITA requires using DITA-aware tools.

• 2.1.1.1 About the specification source
  The DITA specification is authored as a DITA content set and published using the DITA Open Toolkit. It is an example of a complex document that is developed by a team of people and uses many DITA features, including key references (keyrefs) and content references (conrefs).
• 2.1.1.2 DITA terminology and notation
  The DITA specification uses specific notation and terms to define the components of the DITA standard.
• 2.1.1.3 Basic concepts
  DITA has been designed to satisfy requirements for information typing, semantic markup, modularity, reuse, interchange, and production of different deliverable forms from a single source. These topics provide an overview of the key DITA features and facilities that serve to satisfy these requirements.
• 2.1.1.4 File naming conventions
  DITA uses certain naming conventions and file extension for topics, maps, modules, and document-type implementation files.
• 2.1.1.5 Producing different deliverables from a single source
  DITA is designed to produce multiple deliverable formats from a single set of DITA content. This means that many rendition details are specified neither in the DITA specification nor in the DITA content; the rendition details are defined and controlled by the processors.

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DITA v1.2 CD 03
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