Understand DITA and DocBook

You can use Inspire to build and support robust documentation solutions based on DITA and DocBook content models.

DITA

Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) provides a document type definition (DTD) and set of rules. It defines a tag structure for authoring, producing, and delivering documentation. Some distinguishing DITA features include:

  • Forces the use of a topic-oriented structure. Each topic is a piece of modular writing that can be reused. DITA provides three basic topic types, <topic>, <task> and <concept>, but you can adapt parts of these topic types for specialized functions to meet your individual needs.
  • Separates content from context. This allows you to create multiple architectures of information and define custom information types.
  • Uses a ditamap. The map defined links to the XML files in the documentation set. Each XML file can be a topic or a collection of topics.
  • Supports multiple outputs. You can build your content into a wide variety of outputs ranging from PDF and HTML to variable documents. However, all output forms require some development work.

DocBook

DocBook is also an open standard, and provides a DTD for writing for articles and books. Some distinguishing DocBook features include:

  • Forces the use of a section or book structure. Some DocBook tags include <article>, <section>, <title>, <articleinfo>, and <pubdate>.
  • Combines content and context. DocBook is hierarchical by nature, so you must develop the content for true single-sourcing. In DocBook the content is not independent of its context.
  • Uses a fixed set of elements and attributes. You can't adapt or expand on elements like you can in DITA, but DocBook provides a larger set of elements and attributes.
  • Uses an XML include file. You assemble individual file modules into larger documents.
  • Supports multiple outputs. You can build your content into a wide variety of outputs ranging from PDF and HTML to HTMLHelp. It can be extended for other output forms with some development work.

Although the content models differ between DITA and DocBook, you can use all of the topics in the following sections for both XML standards.

If there are instructions specific to working with DocBook content, you can find them in the following section: