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Welcome to the cover page for the DITA forum, a discussion about the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). DITA is an XML-based architecture for creating and deploying modular technical information on varied platforms, from printed manuals to online helpsets to hierarchical information for small-screen devices.
In the forum you can get answers to your questions about DITA (first see the FAQ, linked below in Resources) and you can contribute to the future direction of DITA.
The forum is hosted by Don Day and Michael Priestley, contributors to DITA and the papers that describe DITA and how to use it (see Resources).
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IBM donated DITA to the OASIS standards organization in March of 2004, where it is now managed by the OASIS DITA Technical Committee (http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/dita/). In April of 2005, OASIS approved Version 1.0 of the DITA specification, which consists of the following documents:
- OASIS Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) Language Specification: http://xml.coverpages.org/DITAv10-OS-LangSpec20050509.pdf
- OASIS Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) Architectural Specification: http://xml.coverpages.org/DITAv10-OS-ArchSpec20050509.pdf
- A consolidated .zip file with all specifications, DTDs, and Schemas is publicly available in the documents section of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee site: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/12091/cd2.zip
A reference implementation toolkit for both the developerWorks and OASIS 1.0 versions of the DITA DTDs/Schemas is available at the DITA Open Toolkit project site on SourceForge: http://dita-ot.sourceforge.net. The DITA Open Toolkit supercedes all previous versions published on developerWorks, the last version of which was commonly called "dita132".
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Go directly to the DITA
forum.
- Consult the DITA FAQ to see if your question is answered. Sections in this FAQ list:
- Read up on DITA in Introduction to the DITA (developerWorks, updated September 2005) and in the specializing topics in DITA article (developerWorks, updated September 2005).
- Read Erik Hennum's article Specializing domains in DITA, which shows you how to leverage the extensible DITA DTD to describe new domains of information (developerWorks, updated September 2005).
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Download the latest DITA DTDs, stylesheets, and sample documents.
Besides his main work as husband, father, and cat lover, Don designs and supports publishing tools for IBM's Information Development community and has represented IBM on the W3C XSL and CSS Working Groups. He has B.A.s in English and Journalism and an M.A. in Technical and Professional Communication from New Mexico State University. You can reach Don at dond@us.ibm.com.
Michael Priestley is an information developer for the IBM Toronto Software Development Laboratory. He has written numerous papers on subjects such as hypertext navigation, singlesourcing, and interfaces to dynamic documents. He is currently working on XML and XSL for help and documentation management. You can reach Michael at mpriestl@ca.ibm.com.
