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DITA -- the topic-based XML standard : a quick start
Closs S., Springer International Publishing, New York, NY, 2016. 62 pp. Type: Book (978-3-319283-48-7)
Date Reviewed: Jan 19 2017

Unlike classic Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), which is oriented to the format of material presented on web pages, Extensible Markup Language (XML) allows developers to separate content from format. There are many special-purpose XML implementations to handle the many kinds of content areas. The Darwin information typing architecture (DITA) is used to organize and structure documents for publishing technical documents in different formats, such as printed documents or electronic files (for example, PDF, EPUB, or CHM).

This very small book (only 62 pages including the index) is a guidebook to the architecture. There are 14 chapters, some of which are only a page or two long. Nonetheless, the book covers DITA as a thorough overview of the software technology. It starts with describing DITA and its basic principle, and then a series of chapters describe individual portions of DITA.

The basic principle of DITA is the organization of documents according to prescribed topics defined in the standard, such as “concept,” “glossentry” (glossary entry), “task,” “note,” and “reference,” among others. The task of the developer is to analyze the content of a document (or set of documents) according to topic and label each portion in a code fragment. Each item is unique, separately identifiable, and contains no other information than the text corresponding to its topic.

The central operation is the design of a map in which the individual topics are assembled according to the purposes and intended readers of the document. This is especially important when the same information may have to be published in several versions, such as a quick-start sheet that can be published on both sides of a single sheet of paper and as a full user’s guide that may require many more pages. The organization of the content in this manner ensures that the same information is published in all of the documents generated regardless of their length.

The book uses a small example of publishing instructions on making coffee in order to illustrate how a document can be analyzed into its component topics and then how to assemble them in different publications using the same information. It covers common syntactical elements and offers suggestions and cautions on the organization of the data into files and the usage of the features of the DITA standard. DITA is open source and can be downloaded from the sites given in the references. The current versions of the DITA standard and the DITA Open Toolkit are 1.3 and 2.4.1, respectively. The book is up to date on the standard.

The style of the book is quite readable, but it seems that it was assembled using a DITA map based on a library of topics rather than written as a book with somewhat more graceful bridges and transitions among the sections and paragraphs. Considering the topic, I thought that it was appropriately consistent. In short, it is a useful little book and a good introduction to a tool for organizing and publishing technical documentation.

Reviewer:  Anthony J. Duben Review #: CR145009 (1704-0217)
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