DITA vs. IDITA
Posted by Richard on November 8, 2005
One of the interesting presenters today at the the FrameMaker 2005 Chautauqua was Dave Schell of IBM, and I had a chance to chat with him quite a bit this evening. Schell is the father of DITA, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture.
DITA is an XML "application" — a set of design principles and a tagging language for technical information:
At the heart of DITA, representing the generic building block of a topic-oriented information architecture, is an XML document type definition (DTD) called "the topic DTD." The extensible architecture, however, is the defining part of this design for technical information; the topic DTD, or any schema based on it, is just an instantiation of the design principles of the architecture.
The name reflects the fact that DITA embodies Darwinesque ideas of specialization and differentiation of information types. Schell liked my joke (not original) about the competing standard, IDITA — Intelligent Design Information Typing Architecture. <rimshot>
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