The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is an OASIS-standard XML framework for creating topic-oriented, information-typed content that is rapidly becoming the standard in the information development community. Many of the principles behind DITA are aligned with the authoring principles and user-focused strategy that we’re moving to for content development. DITA provides a standard set of DTDs that prescribe content structure, but allows customization to meet our specific needs (through a feature of DITA called specialization).
In DITA, a topic is the basic unit of authoring and of reuse. A topic is a unit of information with a title and some form of content, short enough to be specific to a single subject or answer a single question, but long enough to make sense on its own and written as a unit.
The following basic topic types are defined in DITA:
Task: Describes the steps to perform a task.
Concept: Introduces the background or overview information for tasks or reference topics.
Reference: Describes regular features of sets of things, such as commands in a programming language and specifications of a hardware component.
In addition to these basic topic types, we have defined three additional information types for our model: Resolution, Scenario, and Structure.
Topics are mapped into deliverables using a special object type called a DITA map. A DITA map identifies the sequence and hierarchy (outline) of the topics in a deliverable. Different output types (PDF, Web content, application-embedded assistance, online help, etc.) can all be constructed from the same set of underlying topic content. However, there may be some topics that are unique to a particular deliverable type, and the organization of topics may differ to take advantage of the unique capabilities of each delivery mechanism.
