DITA

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. It is an open standard that is defined and maintained by the OASIS DITA Technical Committee. wikipedia

The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is one such XML-based vocabulary, designed as an “end-to-end architecture for creating and delivering modular technical information". Originally developed by IBM, DITA is now an open standard maintained by the nonprofit Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS). DITA is one of the main XML vocabularies used for technical and professional purposes in the workplace and academia.

DITA adoption has expanded outside technical communication. As an authoring format that supports and enforces consistent content structures, provides containers for rich metadata, supports multi-channel publishing and content reuse, DITA-based tools have found applications across organizations and departments. DITA is also a key enabling component of Intelligent Content, defined as “content that is structurally rich and semantically categorized, and is therefore automatically discoverable, reusable, reconfigurable, and adaptable.”

However, some practitioners have questioned whether full DITA XML is the ideal language for structuring workplace information in an era of lightweight programming and scripting languages:

“We’ve walled ourselves off, building a fortress of complex tools that no other teams can penetrate. At the same time, we’ve seen successive waves of programming languages, each one easier to use than the last. What are we seeing? Simplification. Ease of use. A learning curve that gets less steep every time. Languages that drop features that aren’t used, or aren’t used often. And what has techcomm poured resources into? DITA. An arcane, overly complex language with a massive learning curve that requires specialized tools.”

In response to those concerns, and with the goal of keeping the DITA standard relevant, the OASIS DITA Technical Committee formed a subcommittee to investigate the feasibility of a simplified version of DITA, possibly not based on XML. This subcommittee has most recently published a committee note that specifies this new expression of DITA.

Lightweight DITA (LwDITA) is a simplified version of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). In comparison to DITA XML, LwDITA has a smaller element and attribute set, stricter content models, and a reduced feature set. LwDITA also defines mappings between XML, HTML5, and Markdown, enabling authoring, collaboration, and publishing across different markup languages.

⇒ Lightweight DITA

EVIA, Carlos and HOUSER, Alan, 2018. Lightweight DITA: Making Structured Authoring More Accessible for Professional Communicators. In: 2018 IEEE International Professional Communication Conference (ProComm). Online. July 2018. p. 219–221. DOI 10.1109/ProComm.2018.00050. [Accessed 29 November 2023]. Lightweight DITA (LwDITA) provides a simplified standard (compared to XML-based alternatives) for authoring in a semantic markup language, while supporting multiple authoring formats. This paper describes the inception, goals, and development of the LwDITA standard.