Many great resources are available to explain the mechanics and syntax of specializing the standard DITA DTDs for your content—for example, Michael Priestley's Specializing topic types in DITA and Eliot Kimber's DITA specialization. However, I didn't see any that walk readers through the process of reviewing their existing content, evaluating its fit with the various DITA topic types, and then designing and building a DITA specialization around the needs and structure of their content, so I wrote the IBM developerWorks tutorial DITA topic specialization: Analyze your content and build a specialized DTD.

That's not exactly my original subtitle, but they just love that second person voice at developerWorks, especially in the imperative.The article now has a lot more of that than I originally put there; maybe I should reread Bright Lights Big City before I write another tutorial for developerWorks.

Nah, I don't think so.

Read the complete article by Bob DuCharme.