Why use DITA?

Topic-based DITA offers flexibility in content organization

DITA is a topic-based architecture. It allows you to order, reorder and nest topics to create any kind of information product.

DITA's modularity allows for reuse

Topics can be used in more than one deliverable at once, independently from other topics.

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Content referencing (conref) is a convenient DITA mechanism for reuse of content from other topics or maps. A fragment of content in one topic or map can be pulled by reference into any other topic or map where the content is allowed. To create the reference, start by creating an empty element of the type that you want to pull in, and then use the element's conref attribute to provide the target's location.

The architectural specification describes content referencing at:

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Conditional processing, also known as profiling, is the filtering or flagging of information based on processing-time criteria. The filtering mechanism first matches against the criteria, and then takes a specified action.

DITA provides several built-in attributes to hold the values for filter criteria for an element. These are:

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Specialization is the process by which new designs are created based on existing designs, allowing new kinds of content to be processed using existing processing rules.

It is the means by which the standard DITA language may be extended for new semantic or structural roles.

Specialization allows you to define new kinds of information (new structural types or new domains of information), while reusing as much of existing design and code as possible, and minimizing or eliminating the costs of interchange, migration, and maintenance.

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DITA maps collect and organize references to DITA topics to indicate the relationships among the topics. They can be used to identify the topics you want to include in a deliverable, and to create tables of contents and related links for the information.

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