Suggesting enhancements to the DITA Standard and Toolkit

This page is intended to facilitate collaboration on ideas for enhancing the DITA specification and the Open Source DITA tools. Add your ideas for new features and capabilities in DITA, and suggestions for improving the flexibility and robustness of the architecture.

Enhancements to the DITA Standard

Please note that actual work on creating or revising the DITA OASIS Standard or specification must take place within the OASIS DITA Technical Committee, which operates under the open OASIS Technical Process. This process, which governs issues such as transparency, contributions, licensing, participation, and disclosure, assures that OASIS Standards remain widely available and safe to implement, produced in an open, democratic, and accountable method.

While this page is a great place to get an enhancement idea started and to encourage informal collaboration, once the idea is ready to be advanced, the discussion should move to the formal OASIS Technical Committee Process. All those who wish to participate in standards development or more closely observe this work are strongly encouraged to join OASIS. A variety of membership levels are offered to assure that everyone affected by standards may contribute to their creation.

You can also provide feedback, such as feature requests for additions or changes to the DITA specification, through the OASIS DITA Comment Form. All comments received via that form are documented and reviewed by the OASIS DITA Committee members and publicly archived.

Enhancements to the DITA Toolkit

The DITA Open Toolkit is an open source project that anyone can contribute to. The best place to request enhancements to the DITA Open Toolkit is by opening a Request For Enhancement (RFE) in the RFE tracker at the DITA-OT Project page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/dita-ot/

Future approaches to subject classification

There are two main approaches to subject classification currently being explored for future use in DITA, which this page will call the map-based approach and the metadata approach.

In the map-based approach, a taxonomy is represented using a hierarchy in a DITA map. Each member of the hierarchy is a specialization of the <topicref> element. Each <topicref> element points to a topic that describes the subject of that node of the taxonomy.

In the metadata approach, the <data> element (which is being introduced in DITA 1.1) is used to record properties. The property stated in a <data> element is considered to apply to:

the enclosing element (the default)
another element (if a URI is specified)
an external object (if a sub-element is used and a URI is specified in the sub-element)

When the <data> element is used within content, the property that it states is considered to apply to the directly enclosing content element. When the <data> element is used in metadata contexts, the property that it states is considered to apply to the nearest enclosing content element (such as <topic>).

Broader topics: