DITA is an XML architecture for documentation. It stands for Darwin Information Typing Architecture. Viewed by some as a competitor to DocBook, it focuses mainly on modular units of documentation, but it also borrows other principles from programming, such as typing and inheritance.
DITA can be used to write documentation in a standard XML-based structure, then publish that documentation into various output formats such as online help or PDF.
The four letters in DITA stand for its four principles:
- Darwin: inheritance; the ability of a unit of documentation to inherit style and structure from its parent
- Information: the focus on transmitting knowledge
- Typing: the principle of describing the structure of a unit of documentation in a way that can be processed by machines
- Architecture: rather than being a set of tools, DITA is really a specification for a method of constructing documentation
DITA's reference implementation is the DITA Open Toolkit (DITA-OT), originally developed at IBM and released as open source. https://www.dita-ot.org/
It is now an OASIS standard. http://dita.xml.org/
You can use the DITA tag for questions about installing tools such as the DITA Open Toolkit, or related plugins for IDEs or editors, as well as for technical questions about customization of the DITA XSL stylesheets, or writing your own customizations.
