The OASIS open standards consortium has announced that its members have approved the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) version 1.3 as an OASIS standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification.
DITA defines an XML architecture for designing, writing, and publishing information in numerous formats, including print, Web-based, mobile, and electronic publications. DITA is widely used for professionally-published books and magazines, technical documentation, online help, training and course development, marketing materials, and medical information because of its modular, topic-based approach and its ability to support content reuse.
This release of DITA comes in three parts, optimized for different audiences:
- Base Edition is designed for application developers and users who need only the most fundamental pieces of the DITA framework.
- Technical Content Edition includes specializations usually used by technical communicators.
- All Inclusive Edition is designed for implementers who want all OASIS-approved specializations, as well as users who develop learning and training materials.
"The unique feature of the DITA standard is specialization," said Kristen James Eberlein, chair of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee. "DITA enables practitioners to create new elements from existing ones in order to increase semantic precision. For example, a section element can be specialized to represent more specific types of sections such as 'Introduction', 'Main point', and 'Conclusion'; this enables more precise semantic searching and better guidance for authors."
"Done correctly," Eberlein continued, "Output processors will always understand the specialization hierarchy – a section is always a section, after all – and be able to apply general processing transformations. Together the re-use and interoperation possibilities of DITA allow great cost sharing and cost reductions."
DITA 1.3 is ready for implementation. Prior to its approval, 14 Statements of Use for DITA 1.3 were provided by Comtech Services, IXIASOFT, PTC, and eleven other organizations and open source initiatives, including the DITA Open Toolkit.
Participation in the OASIS DITA Technical Committee and the DITA Adoption Committee is open to all companies, non-profit groups, governments, academic institutions, and individuals. As with all OASIS projects, archives of the Committees' work are accessible to both members and non-members, and OASIS hosts an open mailing list for public comment.
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