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DITA topic specialization

Analyze your content and build a specialized DTD

Bob DuCharme (bob@snee.com), Solutions Architect, Innodata Isogen
Photo of Bob DuCharme
Bob DuCharme, a solutions architect at Innodata Isogen, was an XML "expert" when XML was a four-letter word. He's written four books and nearly one hundred online and print articles about information technology without using the word "functionality" in any of them. See http://www.snee.com/bob for more and www.snee.com/bobdc.blog for his weblog.

Summary:  Many resources are available to explain what Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) topic specialization is and the syntax to implement it, but you still might wonder "I have some content that might be a candidate for topic specialization. What's next?" In this tutorial, walk through a series of steps to evaluate your content's suitability for different DITA topic types, specialize one of those types, and test your specialization using the DITA Open Toolkit.

Date:  26 Feb 2008
Level:  Intermediate
PDF:  A4 and Letter (58 KB | 16 pages)Get Adobe® Reader®

Activity:  9632 views
Comments:  

Before you start

About this tutorial

Frequently used acronyms

  • DTD: Document Type Declaration
  • XHTML: Extensible HyperText Markup Language
  • XML: Extensible Markup Language

This tutorial walks you through the design, implementation, and testing of a DITA topic specialization. After reviewing some sample content and mocking up some DITA versions, you'll create the DITA specialization DTD, revise the samples to conform to it, and then test them by creating XHTML versions of the sample documents with the DITA Open Toolkit to make sure that everything is in place.

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Objectives

In this tutorial, you will:

  • Consider issues in content analysis and DITA specialization
  • Decide which DITA topic type provides the best basis for your specialization
  • Code the DTD to implement that specialization
  • Test your implementation

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Prerequisites

This tutorial is written for XML developers with a basic understanding of DITA, DTD syntax, and the editing of XML documents to be valid to a particular DTD.

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System requirements

To run the examples in this tutorial, you need:

  • An editor that can edit XML documents
  • A tool for validating documents
  • An installed copy of the open source DITA Open Toolkit

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Why specialize?

Before you begin, think about the reasons for specialization: a new class of DITA topic types customized for your content can be leaner and use different element names. With a leaner, shorter list of elements to think about as they create and edit content, your authors and editors will make fewer errors. And, when the element names reflect the content they work with instead of the generalized choices made by the DITA Technical Committee, writing and editing of content is more intuitive for the staff who work with the documents.

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