DITA Specialization

DITA specialization is used when new kinds of information more specific than exisitng information types are needed. It is the process by which you can create new DITA document types and elements based on existing ones. Reusing as much of existing design and code as possible minimizes the costs of development of new document architectures.

New information types are inherited from existing information types. For example, bookmap is a specialization of map, while task, concept and reference are specializations of the generic topic.

For more information about DITA specialization, see http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.1/CS01/archspec/ditaspecialization.html.

You can create your own DITA specialization. See an example of topic specialization: DITA FAQ topic at http://www.ditausers.org/examples/dita_faq/.

Serna natively supports DITA specialization (it does not depend on element names) in stylesheets, DITA dialogs and for context-specific custom content insertion. You can create your own specialization and work with it in Serna.

If you have your own specialization, provide Serna with the following:
  1. Schema

  2. Stylesheet

  3. Serna document template

Related concepts
DITA Topics
DITA Maps