Darwin Information Typing Architecture
The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) specification defines a set of document types for authoring and organizing topic-oriented information, as well as a set of mechanisms for combining, extending, and constraining document types. It is an open standard that is defined and maintained by the OASIS DITA Technical Committee. The name derives from the following components: Darwin: it uses the principles of specialization and inheritance, which is in some ways analogous to the naturalist Charles Darwin's concept of evolutionary adaptation, Information Typing: which means each topic has a defined primary objective (procedure, glossary entry, troubleshooting information) and structure, Architecture: DITA is an extensible set of structures. Features and limitations Content reuse Topics are the foundation for content reuse, and can be reused across multiple publications. Fragments of content within topics can be reused through the use of content references (conref or conkeyref), a transclusion mechanism. Information typing The latest version of DITA (DITA 1.3) includes five specialized topic types: Task, Concept, Reference, Glossary Entry, and Troubleshooting. Each of these five topic types is a specialization of a generic Topic type, which contains a title element, a prolog element for metadata, and a body element. The body element contains paragraph, table,