The official specification of the DITA language is available from OASIS.

OASIS DITA Version 1.1. Language Specification

The language reference describes the elements that comprise the topic DTD and its initial, information-typed descendents: concept, reference, task, and glossentry. It also describes the DITA map DTD and its current specialization (bookmap), as well as various topic and map based DITA domains.

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The DITA Open Toolkit is a modest publishing system. The Toolkit transforms DITA content (maps and topics) into publishing deliverable formats for web (XHTML), print (PDF), and Help (CHM and Eclipse). Your output files are simply generated in your file system. It is up to you to move them to your website, or into your print publishing process.

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DITA files can simply be kept in a file system, where it is important to observe best practices in naming files and file folders.

They can also be stored in a content management system (CMS).  Some CMS's store their files in a file system, but most keep the files in a database. Since DITA files are XML files, there may be an advantage to a CMS that uses a native XML database, though performance claims have been made for ordinary relational databases.

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DITA authoring tools are a subset of XML authoring tools. There are three basic types, desktop application editors, web/browser-based edtiors, and Word-to-DITA editors

Although even a simple text editor can be used to author DITA, editors that have been optimized for DITA offer a number of valuable features:

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