Outline
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What is DITA?
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History
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Standards
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Principles
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Tools
IBM and the Consortium OASIS have introduced
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Customizable tool for creation of topic-oriented markups.
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It is a predefined markup but extensible.
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Similar principles as in OO languages.
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Enables specialization (inherit and modify).
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Suitable where a highly structured, well defined semantics is available.
History and Presence
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Since 2001 DITA developed by IBM (motivation: fixed markups are not enough)
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In 2004, the standard donated to OASIS.
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Maintained by OASIS DITA Technical Committee
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April 2005 — Version 1.0 of the DITA specification:
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Latest version 1.2 OASIS Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) Version 1.2 Specification, OASIS standard, approved 1 December 2010
Concepts
- topic
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téma — an atomic information unit defined by name and content; atomic in terms of meaning and origin — a smaller one would not bear a meaning
- map
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mapa — document organizing topics into bigger units defining relations among topics
DITA Principles 1
- specialization
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specializace — technique to define new structural types or new information domains) by maximal reusing of existing desing and code, saving as much costs related to introduction of new types (data exchange, migration, maintenance)
- structural specialization
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strukturální specializace — allows creation of new topic types or maps (map types)
- domain specialization
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doménová specializace — enables creation of new markup applicable to more structural types (eg. new keyword types, tables, lists)
DITA Principles 2
- integration
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integrace — every domain and structural specialization has its own module. Modules can be combined in the so-called integration process.
- customization
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přizpůsobení — eg. if you require that a change in output can be done without impairing the portability and data exchange, without specialization
- generalization
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generalizace — offers the opportunity to understand the specialized content as the content of the parent (general) type even with the possibility the proposal back to the specialized content (round-tripping).
Tools
- DITA Open Toolkit 2.0
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recent version of the fundamental DITA processing software, enabling production of PDF, ODT, (X)HTML, RTF, JavaHelp and many other output formats. The DITA Open Toolkit is freely available, you can install it and try to publish the following free DITA samples to produce eg. HTML5 output:
- Encyclopeadia Brittanica DITA Sample
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E.B. Vol.3, Part 3-4 is a part of DITA2InDesign project
Much simpler sample is part of the DITA OT under http://dita-ot.sourceforge.net/doc/ot-userguide13/xhtml/samples/samples.html