About Darwin Information Technology Architecture (DITA)

DITA is an XML-based open standard used to create technical content. XML files rely on data type definitions (DTD). DITA is a DTD for authoring systems. Structured Document Editor supports the lightweight DITA standard.

Lightweight DITA is a simplified version of DITA with a smaller element and attribute set with a stricter content model.

Structured Document Editor uses two components to define documents:

  • Maps
  • Topics

Maps organize the topics and are used to generate the document. A topic can be used in multiple maps. You can create a hierarchical structure for your document by adding topics to existing topics, effectively creating subtopics.

Topics have a basic structure with a title, short description, and body. For descriptions of the elements you can include in a topic, see Topic Elements.

DITA and XML use elements, attributes, and properties to define content. Structured Document Editor hides the complexity of these items so you can concentrate on the content. You do not need to know element names to author content. For example, to add a bulleted list to your content, the code would look like this:

<ul>
   <li>Some text.</li>
   <li>Some more text.</li>
</ul>

You can click Unordered List on the toolbar without needing to know the code structure. Structured Document Editor takes care of making sure all the elements follow the Lightweight DITA syntax. If you are curious about the code, XML Element Reference lists the supported elements.