by Loretta Hicks, IBM developerWorks

A previous article in this series described the basics for transforming Eclipse navigation files to Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) format. In August 2005, the OASIS DITA Toolkit 1.1 implemented a new way to integrate DITA navigation files. The new capability is called 'mapref' and provides an alternative to using the navref element to integrate navigation files, as described in the previous article. This article compares the mapref and navref methods of integrating navigation files. You'll find the download archive for this article includes an updated XSLT stylesheet that exploits the mapref capability and offers other enhancements to the stylesheet from the earlier article. The OASIS DITA 1.0 specification added the option to use a specially coded 'topicref' element in one DITA map to embed another DITA map. That coding convention is currently called mapref, which is different from the mapref attribute of the 'navref' element. The OASIS DITA Toolkit 1.1 implements the OASIS DITA 1.0 specification. The XSLT stylesheet included with this article supports an input parameter for specifying which integration method to use. Transforming Eclipse TOC files to DITA map files is easier now because both are XML files and describe a topic hierarchy.