DITA FAQs
What is DITA?
The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is a comprehensive framework for authoring, managing, and distributing topic-oriented information in XML.
First developed by IBM, DITA goes beyond any previous approach in helping organizations overcome barriers to XML adoption, maximize content reuse, and reduce information redundancies.
Today, DITA is a widely supported specification managed by OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), the industry body responsible for many other business-oriented XML standards.
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What kind of organizations can benefit from DITA?
DITA is a compelling opportunity for any organization considering an XML authoring system, or that could benefit from a reusable content strategy.
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What kind of deliverables is DITA best suited for?
DITA is suitable for any kind of deliverable, including printed books, but is best suited for topic-oriented content such as:
- Websites
- Knowledgebases
- Online Help
- Computer-based training and testing
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What is a DITA map? What is the difference between a DITA map and a Topic map?
A DITA map is a collection of topic references. It allows you to organize different combinations of topics for different outputs and deliverables. Topic maps are an ISO standard for describing knowledge structures and associating them with information resources.
While DITA maps borrow many ideas from topic maps, they are primarily concerned with the practical application to technical documentation.
The topic maps specification is a much more general reference for organizing and managing knowledge.
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What is the difference between DITA and DocBook?
First, DITA breaks information into a much more granular structure than DocBook, which makes content reuse easier. DITA was designed for documentation of discrete topics, while DocBook was designed for a single, linear deliverable such as a book.
Although content written in DocBook can be "chunked" via transformation into topics, DITA provides an added level of flexibility that enables compilation of topics into multiple information sets, called "Topic Maps."
Second, DITA is much more supportive of extending and modifying the underlying XML DTD. DITA's approach, called "Specialization" requires new document types to inherit markup and rules from an existing document type, which vastly reduces the amount of work needed to customize DTDs for specific technical contexts and improves overall interoperability.
The DocBook specification, on the other hand, was designed to handle all the standard requirements for technical documentation and discourages extensions as these may hinder tool support and interoperability.
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Is it difficult to migrate from DocBook to DITA?
The degree of difficulty will depend on two key factors: people and processes.
If you create topic-oriented information in DocBook today, you can transition writers and existing processes over to DITA fairly easily.
If you are creating linear, sequential information in DocBook, then some additional planning will be required to break your content into topics.
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How does DITA support content reuse where you need to change the content between reuse instances?
DITA provides rich support for setting conditional text using selection attributes, enabling different versions of a document to be created from a single source file. The attributes are used to flag and filter conditional content in deliverables.
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Are there localization capabilities in DITA? How does DITA help in translations when translating complex language structures?
DITA supports translation by providing specialized attributes for flagging content that requires translation. In addition, DITA's topic-orientation and built-in reuse features make it easier to manage translation projects. However, DITA does not help with language structure or presentation issues (such as frames and page layout). Presentation is handled by style sheets that get applied to the DITA content.
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How do you group DITA topics together into a deliverable so that the output feels like a cohesive whole instead of a disjointed compilation?
DITA maps organize topics into sets that are used to produce various types of deliverables, including books. One tip for improving the flow of a book is to create transition topics, whose purpose is to provide the introduction to the following topics, similar to the way that chapters and section overviews introduce content.
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What are some of the best practices for finding topics in a library of topics?
Most CMS's have sophisticated tools for categorizing, browsing, and searching through topics.
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What is the DITA Open Toolkit?
The DITA Open Toolkit is an open source collection of sample files, stylesheets, and tools to help get you started with DITA.
You can download the toolkit at http://sourceforge.net/projects/dita-ot/.
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Are there any reference implementations of DITA that we could use as a template for our implementation?
Yes. The DITA Open Toolkit is an open source implementation of the specification for DITA DTDs and Schemas. The Toolkit also transforms DITA content (maps and topics) into various deliverable formats, including PDF, HTML, and several help formats.
XMetaL Author Enterprise integrates the DITA Open Toolkit into its authoring environment, letting users experience the Toolkit's features and capabilities "out-of the-box".
You can download the toolkit at http://sourceforge.net/projects/dita-ot/.
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Does my Content Management System (CMS) need to support DITA?
Most content management systems that can handle granular XML content can be configured for DITA, and a number of CMS vendors have announced DITA support.
To get the maximum benefit from DITA, a CMS should be able to support the following:
- Track map to topic, map to map and topic to topic links
- Perform batch operations (e.g. checkout) on full deliverables (a map and related sub-maps, topics)
- Route complete deliverables (maps and related sub-maps, topics) through workflows
- Extract metadata from DITA topics for searching
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Is there an XML Schema for DITA?
Yes. The DITA Open Toolkit provides both DTD and XML Schema representations of the DITA architecture.
You can download the toolkit at http://sourceforge.net/projects/dita-ot/.
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