What_DITA_is.dita

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 <title>What DITA is</title>
 <shortdesc/>
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  <p>DITA is a way of organizing and tagging your content (content is what the authors write and the
   editors edit) to create deliverables. (what the end user reads and learn from) It is a way of
   organizing your content in smaller chunks, so that rather than writing up one huge document as a
   Word file and then a second set of documents for a Power Point slideshow and a third set of
   documents as a html help file, you only write it once and then use XSLT (a pattern matching
   technology) to convert it into the desired output format your end user sees. Because the content
   (the important stuff) is separated from the formatting (font sizes, colors, page numbering, and
   so on) it is very easy to take it and convert it into another content tagging format without
   losing information.</p>

  <p>For example the two most common ways of publishing data stored in DITA are HTML and PDF. The
   final step in the processing of each of these deliverable formats is to add the style information
   that makes the finished product look the way the publisher wants it to. DITA is an XML language.
   Because of their regularity and consistent definitions, XML languages can be easily translated
   into each other without loss of information.</p>

  <p> DITA is similar in appearance to html. But where html is designed for presenting deliverables,
   DITA is optimized for authoring content. Both XML and HTML are descended from SGML, an early data
   markup language. Semantic markup Just about every corporate style guide has a list of the
   formatting used to visually identify the different features. For example, all products manuals
   that show a GUI (graphic user interface) have special formatting for UI elements, filenames, and
   programming code. But while O'Reily Press uses italics for filenames, IBM uses monospace, and
   Microsoft uses TitleCaps, they all mean the same thing. So DITA tags them with the
   &lt;filepath&gt; element. Then, if someone high up in the corporation decides that filenames
   should be displayed in the corporate color, the change only needs to be done on the stylesheets
   (stored on a corporate server), not on every single document produced by the corporation. DITA
   has semantic tagging elements for all the types of content that commonly occur in Technical
   Communication and has the capability of adding more as the need arises. </p>

  <p>DITA is similar in appearance to html. But where html is designed for presenting deliverables,
   DITA is optimized for authoring content. Both XML and HTML are descended from SGML, an early data
   markup language.</p>

 </conbody>
</concept>