Basic DITA terminology
Certain terminology is used for basic DITA components.
- DITA document
-
An XML document that conforms to the requirements of this specification.
A DITA document MUST have as its root element one of the following elements:<map>or a specialization of the<map>element<topic>or a specialization of the<topic>element<dita>, which cannot be specialized, but which allows documents with multiple sibling topics
- DITA document type
- A unique set of structural modules, domain modules, and constraint modules that taken together provide the XML element and attribute declarations that define the structure of DITA documents.
- DITA document-type shell
- A set of DTD or RELAX NG declarations that implement a DITA document type by
using the rules and design patterns that are included in the DITA specification.
A DITA document-type shell includes and configures one or more structural
modules, zero or more domain modules, and zero or more constraint modules. With
the exception of the optional declarations for the
<dita>element and its attributes, DITA document-type shells do not declare any element or attribute types directly. - DITA element
- An XML element instance whose type is a DITA element type. DITA elements must
exhibit a
@classattribute that has a value that conforms to the rules for specialization hierarchy specifications. - DITA element type
- An element type that is either one of the base element types that are defined by the DITA specification, or a specialization of one of the base element types.
- map instance
- An occurrence of a map type in a DITA document.
- map type
- A map or a specialization of map that defines a set of relationships among topic instances.
- structural type instance
- An occurrence of a topic type or a map type in a DITA document.
- topic instance
- An occurrence of a topic type in a DITA document.
- topic type
- A topic or a specialization of topic that defines a complete unit of content.