DITA

Hi Everyone,

A quick summary of DITA for the public-i18n-its@w3.org mailing list:

The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is a proposed OASIS 
standard 
(http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=dita). It 
provides a comprehensive architecture for the authoring, production and 
delivery of technical documentation. DITA was originally developed 
within IBM and then donated to OASIS. The essence of DITA is the concept 
of topic based publication construction and development that allows for 
the modular reuse of specific sections. Each section is authored 
independently and then each publication is constructed from the section 
modules. This means that individual sections only need to be authored 
and translated once, and may be reused many times over in different 
publications.

A core component of DITA is the concept of defining generic 
"information-typed" modules at a topic level.

DITA represents a very intelligent and well thought out approach to the 
process of publishing technical documentation. At the core of DITA is 
the concept the ‘topic’. A topic is a unit of information that describes 
a single task, concept, or reference item.
DITA uses an object orientated approach to the concept of topics 
encompassing the standard object oriented characteristics of 
polymorphisms, encapsulation and message passing.

The main features of DITA are:
1.    Topic centric level of granularity
2.    Substantial reuse of existing assets
3.    Specialization at the topic and domain level
4.    Meta data property based processing
5.    Leveraging existing popular element names and attributes from XHTML

For a comprehensive introduction to DITA please refer to the IBM DITA 
information page 
(http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-dita1/).

I predict a very good future for DITA, on the basis that it represents a 
very well thought out and flexible architecture for content creation and 
publishing. From the localization point of view it means that once you 
have translated a topic into a given target language, then it can be 
reused time and time again as long as the source language content has 
not been modified.


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Received on Sunday, 10 April 2005 15:02:58 UTC