Architectural attributes

The architectural attributes specify the version of DITA that the content supports; they also identify the DITA domains, structural types, and specializations that are in use by the content.

The architectural attributes should not be marked up in the source DITA map and topics. Instead, the values of the architectural attributes are handled by the processor when the content is processed, preferably through defaults set in the XML grammar. This practice ensures that the DITA content instances do not specify invalid values for the architectural attributes.

The architectural attributes are as follows:

@class

This attribute identifies the specialization hierarchy for the element type. Every DITA element (except the <dita> element that is used as the root of a ditabase document) MUST declare a @class attribute.

@domains

This attribute identifies the domain modules (and optionally the structural modules) that are used in a map or topic. Each module also declares its module dependencies. The root element of every topic and map MUST declare a @domains attribute.

@DITAArchVersion

This attribute identifies the version of the DITA architecture that is used by the XML grammar. The root element of every topic and map MUST declare a @DITAArchVersion attribute. The attribute is declared in a DITA namespace to allow namespace-sensitive tools to detect DITA markup.

To make the document instance usable in the absence of an XML grammar, a normalization process can set the architectural attributes in the document instance.