Maps separate the context of your information deliverable from its content. In a typical HTML-based web site, any change to the appearance or navigation of the site typically means making updates to dozens or more individual HTML pages. DITA enables all the navigation (sequences, hierarchies, relationtions) to be managed from a DITA map, which allows authors to manage navigation from a single structure, and then generate new web pages as needed.

Maps let you organize topics that you want to build into an output web or PDF. You can also generate navigation files based on the map structure, and generate links that get added to the topics.

A map file references one or more DITA topic files using <topicref> elements. The <topicref> elements can be nested to reflect the desired hierarchical relationships of the topics. Map files need to have a file extension of .ditamap to be processed properly.

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The basic concepts of DITA are not tied to implementation. Both schemas and DTDs can be used to define specializable DITA elements. The current DITA Open Toolkit provides both DTDs and XML Schemas.

It's important to recognize that DocBook and DITA take fundamentally different approaches.

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The DITA FAQs provide additional information about topic oriented writing. The following sites also provide background on information architecture principles inherent in DITA:

1. Minimalism (John Carroll)
2. DITA: An XML-based Technical Documentation Authoring and Publishing Architecture

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