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Within the DITA architecture, there are three types of topics: concept, task and reference. These are very useful for complex technical documentation where much of the material falls logically into one of these topic types. |
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Are documents that collect and organize references to DITA topics to indicate the relationships among the topics. They can also serve as outlines or tables of contents for DITA deliverables and as build manifests for DITA projects. |
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A topic is flat structure unit of information with a title and some form of content that can be authored as a unit. One topic is never nested within another. Topics can be reused in different information models, and the DITA architecture will process them consistently. |
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An element with the content in one topic or map can be reused by reference into any other topic or map where the content is allowed. With this type of content referencing mechanism, each element has Content inclusion (conref) attribute that can reference an equivalent element in the same topic or in a different one. |
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Is the process by which new designs are created based off existing designs, allowing new kinds of content to be processed using existing processing rules. Specialization allows DITA users to define new kinds of projects or information while reusing as much existing information as possible. Specialization can have dramatic benefits for the development of new document architectures. |
- Conditional processing (profiling):
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Is the filtering or flagging of information based using specific metadata attributes on content. These metadata values can then be leveraged by any number of processes, including filtering, flagging, search, and indexing, rather than being suitable for filtering only. |
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Content may be chunked (divided or merged into new output documents) in different ways for the purposes of authoring, for delivering content, and for navigation. For example, something best authored as a set of separate topics may need to be delivered as a single Web page. A map author can use the chunk attribute to split up single documents into component topics or combine multiple topics into a single document as part of output processing. |
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DITA has specific capabilities for preparing content for translation and working with multilingual content, including the xml:lang attribute, the dir attribute, and the translate attribute. |
