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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.
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.
RELAX NG coding requirements
This section explains how to implement RELAX NG based document-type shells, specializations, and constraints.

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.
- 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.
  - Recognized XML-document grammar mechanisms
    The DITA standard recognizes three XML-document grammar mechanisms by which conforming DITA vocabulary modules and document types can be constructed: document type declarations (DTDs), XML Schema declarations (XSDs), and RELAX NG grammars.
  - Normative versions of DITA grammar files
    The OASIS DITA Technical Committee uses the RELAX NG XML syntax for the normative versions of the XML grammar files that comprise the DITA release.
  - DTD coding requirements
    This section explains how to implement DTD based document-type shells, specializations, and constraints.
  - RELAX NG coding requirements
    This section explains how to implement RELAX NG based document-type shells, specializations, and constraints.
    - RELAX NG: Overview of coding requirements
      RELAX NG modules are self-integrating, which means that they automatically add to the content models and attribute sets they extend. This means that information architects do not have much work to do when assembling vocabulary modules and constraints into document type shells.
    - RELAX NG: Coding requirements for document-type shells
      A document-type shell integrates one or more topic type or map type modules, zero or more domain modules, and zero or more constraint modules.
    - RELAX NG: Coding requirements for element type declarations
      Structural and domain vocabulary modules have the same coding requirements for element type declarations. Each RELAX NG vocabulary module consists of a single module file.
    - RELAX NG: Coding requirements for structural modules
      A structural vocabulary module defines a new topic or map type as a specialization of a topic or map type.
    - RELAX NG: Coding requirements for element domain modules
      Vocabulary modules that define element domains must define an extension pattern for each element that is extended by the domain. These patterns are used when including the domain module in a document-type shell.
    - RELAX NG: Coding requirements for attribute domain modules
      An attribute domain vocabulary module declares a new attribute specialized from either the @props or @base attribute. An attribute domain module defines exactly one new attribute type.
    - RELAX NG: Coding requirements for constraint modules
      A structural constraint module defines the constraints for a map or topic element type. A domain constraint module defines the constraints for an element or attribute domain.
  - XML Schema coding requirements
    This section explains how to implement XML Schema (XSD) based document-type shells, 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.

RELAX NG coding requirements

This section explains how to implement RELAX NG based document-type shells, specializations, and constraints.