DITA Introduction
In this section, DITA and the technologies in the background are explained.
What is XML?
DITA is based on the Extensible Markup Language (XML). XML is a meta-language for creating new languages. To understand what DITA is, it is important to understand what XML is and how it works.
What is DITA?
This section explains the basic principles of DITA.
The History of DTA
This is a short summary of the DITA history. The detailed history can be looked up at http://dita.xml.org/book/history-of-dita.
Simple project hierarchy
A DITA project usually contains a DITA Map with multiple <topicref> elements that reference DITA Topics.
Why using DITA?
This section lists benefits of DITA.
Who is using DITA
This list shows the companies who voted for the DITA 1.3 specification.
DITA at SAP
SAP presented their worldwide DITA environment at the DITA-OT-Day 2016 in Munich/Germany.
DITA-OT
The DITA-OT is the unofficial reference implementation of the DITA standard. It is a set of tools and technologies to process DITA maps and topics and to create output formats like PDF or HTML5. The DITA-OT is licensed under the Apache Public License 2 (APL2) and is hosted on Github.
Key Features
This section introduces some DITA specific features that exemplify content re-use.
Content Reference (conref)
The content reference mechanism pulls a content block to another topic.
Key Reference (keyref)
The key reference mechanism has been developed to decouple information.
Content Key Reference (conkeyref)
The content key reference mechanism combines the content reference mechanism with the key reference mechanism.
Content Reference End (conrefend)
The content reference end mechansim specifies an element, that is the last element of a content reference range. It is used together with a content reference or content key reference, that specifies the first element.
Relationship Table (reltable)
Relationship Tables externalize links and decouple topics from each other, because the topics themselves do not contain links to other topics, that could break, if the target topics are missing.
Content Reference Push (conref push)
The content reference push mechanism is the opposite of a content reference.
Filtering (DITAVAL)
A DITAVAL file includes, excludes or flags elements with filter attributes. DITAVAL files can be passed into the build process by the dita.input.valfile property or by <ditavalref>.
Subject Scheme
The Subject Scheme Map is a specialized DITA Map that defines allowed attribute values.
Key Scopes
Keys can be limited to a specific scope by defining key scopes. This mechanism can be used to fill template topics, that are referenced multiple times, with different data.
DITA Pros and Cons
The implementation of DITA may be a complex task. This section lists pros and cons to consider in your calculation before implementing DITA.