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Architectural specification: All-inclusive edition
The architectural specification portion of the DITA specification outlines the framework of DITA. It contains an overview of DITA markup; addressing; processing; configuration, specialization, generalization, and constraints; as well as information about coding DITA grammar files.
DITA processing
DITA processing is affected by a number of factors, including attributes that indicate the set of vocabulary and constraint modules on which a DITA document depends; navigation; linking; content reuse (using direct or indirect addressing); conditional processing; branch filtering; chunking; and more. In addition, translation of DITA content is expedited through the use of the @dir, @translate, and @xml:lang attributes, and the <index-sort-as> element.
Content reference (conref)
The DITA conref attributes provide mechanisms for reusing content. DITA content references support reuse scenarios that are difficult or impossible to implement using other XML-based inclusion mechanisms like XInclude and entities. Additionally, DITA content references have rules that help ensure that the results of content inclusion remain valid after resolution

Specification URIs
Notices
Introduction to DITA 1.3
The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) specification defines a set of document types for authoring and organizing topic-oriented information, as well as a set of mechanisms for combining, extending, and constraining document types.
Architectural specification: All-inclusive edition
The architectural specification portion of the DITA specification outlines the framework of DITA. It contains an overview of DITA markup; addressing; processing; configuration, specialization, generalization, and constraints; as well as information about coding DITA grammar files.
- Introduction to DITA
  The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is an XML-based architecture for authoring, producing, and delivering topic-oriented, information-typed content that can be reused and single-sourced in a variety of ways. While DITA historically has been driven by the requirements of large-scale technical documentation authoring, management, and delivery, it is a standard that is applicable to any kind of publication or information that might be presented to readers, including interactive training and educational materials, standards, reports, business documents, trade books, travel and nature guides, and more.
- DITA markup
  Topics and maps are the basic building blocks of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). Metadata attributes and values can be added to DITA topics and maps, as well as to elements within topics, to allow for conditional publishing and content reuse.
- DITA addressing
  DITA provides two addressing mechanisms. DITA addresses either are direct URI-based addresses, or they are indirect key-based addresses. Within DITA documents, individual elements are addressed by unique identifiers specified on the @id attribute. DITA defines two fragment-identifier syntaxes; one is the full fragment-identifier syntax, and the other is an abbreviated fragment-identifier syntax that can be used when addressing non-topic elements from within the same topic.
- DITA processing
  DITA processing is affected by a number of factors, including attributes that indicate the set of vocabulary and constraint modules on which a DITA document depends; navigation; linking; content reuse (using direct or indirect addressing); conditional processing; branch filtering; chunking; and more. In addition, translation of DITA content is expedited through the use of the @dir, @translate, and @xml:lang attributes, and the <index-sort-as> element.
  - Navigation
    DITA includes markup that processors can use to generate reader navigation to or across DITA topics. Such navigation behaviors include table of contents (TOCs) and indexes.
  - Content reference (conref)
    The DITA conref attributes provide mechanisms for reusing content. DITA content references support reuse scenarios that are difficult or impossible to implement using other XML-based inclusion mechanisms like XInclude and entities. Additionally, DITA content references have rules that help ensure that the results of content inclusion remain valid after resolution
    - Conref overview
      The DITA @conref, @conkeyref, @conrefend, and @conaction attributes provide mechanisms for reusing content within DITA topics or maps. These mechanisms can be used both to pull and push content.
    - Processing conrefs
      When processing content references, DITA processors compare the restrictions of each context to ensure that the conrefed content is valid in its new context.
    - Processing attributes when resolving conrefs
      When resolving conrefs, processors need to combine the attributes that are specified on the referencing and referenced element.
    - Processing xrefs and conrefs within a conref
      When referenced content contains a content reference or cross reference, the effective target of the reference depends on the form of address that is used in the referenced content. It also might depend on the map context, especially when key scopes are present.
  - Conditional processing (profiling)
    Conditional processing, also known as profiling, is the filtering or flagging of information based on processing-time criteria.
  - Branch filtering
    The branch filtering mechanism enables map authors to set filtering conditions for specific branches of a map. This makes it possible for multiple conditional-processing profiles to be applied within a single publication.
  - Chunking
    Content can be chunked (divided or merged into new output documents) in different ways for the purposes of delivering content and navigation. For example, content best authored as a set of separate topics might need to be delivered as a single Web page. A map author can use the @chunk attribute to split up multi-topic documents into component topics or to combine multiple topics into a single document as part of output processing.
  - Translation and localization
    DITA has features that facilitate preparing content for translation and working with multilingual content, including the @xml:lang attribute, the @dir attribute, and the @translate attribute. In addition, the <sort-as> and <index-sort-as> elements provide support for sorting in languages in which the correct sorting of an element requires text that is different from the base content of the element.
  - Processing documents with different values of the @domains attribute
    When DITA elements are copied from one document to another, processors need to determine the validity of the copied elements. This copying might occur as the result of a content reference (conref) or key reference (keyref), or it might occur in the context of an author editing a DITA document.
  - Sorting
    Processors can be configured to sort elements. Typical processing includes sorting glossary entries, lists of parameters or reference entries in custom navigation structures, and tables based on the contents of cells in specific columns or rows.
- Configuration, specialization, generalization, and constraints
  The extension facilities of DITA allow existing vocabulary and constraint modules to be combined to create specific DITA document types. Vocabulary modules also can be specialized to meet requirements that are not satisfied by existing markup.
- Coding practices for DITA grammar files
  This section collects all of the rules for creating modular DTD, RELAX NG, or XML Schema grammar files to represent DITA document types, specializations, and constraints.
- Technical content specializations
  This section contains information about the technical content specializations. It includes a summary of the document types and domains, as well as information about how the technical content specializations support authoring troubleshooting information.
- Learning and training specializations
  The section contains information about the learning and training specializations: Challenges faced by developers of instructional content; use cases; objectives of the specializations; information about the reusable learning-objects approach to learning and training content; summary of the topic types and domains; and more.
Language reference: All-inclusive edition
The language reference portion of the DITA specification contains a topic for each DITA element. The topic defines the element, its inheritance hierarchy, and provides examples of usage. This portion of the DITA specification also includes information about DITA attributes.
Conformance
Conformance to the DITA specification allows documents and document types that are used with different processors or different versions of a processor to produce the same or similar results with little or no reimplementation or modification.
Acknowledgments
(Non-normative) Many members of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee participated in the creation of this specification and are gratefully acknowledged.
Non-normative information
This section contains non-normative information, including topics about new features in DITA 1.3 and migrating from DITA 1.2 to DITA 1.3.
Content models for learning and training package
For each element in the learning and training package, this section presents the content model and a list of parent elements that can contain that element.

Content reference (conref)

The DITA conref attributes provide mechanisms for reusing content. DITA content references support reuse scenarios that are difficult or impossible to implement using other XML-based inclusion mechanisms like XInclude and entities. Additionally, DITA content references have rules that help ensure that the results of content inclusion remain valid after resolution