DITA – Darwin Information Typing Architecture is an open standard defined and maintained by the OASIS DITA Technical Committee. The latest (current) version is 1.3, approved in December 2015. An errata document for DITA 1.3 was approved in October 2016.
DITA is an XML standard for authoring, publishing, and producing technical documents. It consists of a set of design principles that help to create and manage content separately from formatting. If you want to understand how it works, you must understand how DITA uses topics, maps, and output formats.
DITA helps to:
- standardize and organize the content into topics;
- make the content more versatile and portable by separating information from its format;
- transform the content into other formats.
You create your content in DITA topics, apply DITA maps to define which topics move into which deliverables, then handle those maps to DITA output formats to produce your final deliverables.
Localization
DITA provides support for translation via the localization attribute group. Element attributes can be set to indicate whether the content of the element should be translated. The language of the element content can be specified, as can the writing direction, the index filtering, and some terms that are injected when publishing to the final format. A DITA project can be converted to an XLIFF file and back into its original maps and topics, using the DITA-XLIFF Roundtrip Tool for DITA-OT and computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools designed to implement the translation workflow suggested by the article “Using XLIFF to Translate DITA Projects” published by the DITA Adoption TC at OASIS.
DITA, HTML, and XML have key differences:
- Tag and Attribute Handling:
- HTML: Tags and attributes are used, and it is forgiving about missing closing tags.
- DITA: Requires all tags to be properly closed, similar to XML.
- XML: Tags and attributes must be correctly closed and well-formed.
- Tag Flexibility:
- HTML: Uses a predefined set of tags (e.g., body, p, span) that cannot be modified.
- XML: Allows the use of standard tags and user-defined tags, with the latter defined in a separate file.
- Tag Order:
- HTML: Flexible regarding the order of tags in a document.
- DITA: Enforces a specific order for tags and requires particular tags to appear first.
- Root Tag:
- HTML: The root tag is always
<html>. - DITA: The root tag varies based on the topic type, such as
<concept>,<task>, or<reference>.
- HTML: The root tag is always
- Tool Availability:
- DITA: Can be used with free tools, but many feature-rich software options are available for more advanced content development.
While free tools are available for working with DITA, there are also many comprehensive software options designed to facilitate content development.
Read more on DITA in the ClickHelp as a DITA Alternative blog post.