While attending the Conference for Software User Assistance, I came across an unfamiliar concept: DITA. "Dit-uh," I thought. "What in the heck does that mean?"
Turns out, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture, or DITA, is a way of authoring content that is maximally efficient. When you write using DITA, you break your content down into topics. These topics are generally sorted into three different types: tasks, concepts, and references. There are other topic types that are used, but the three I mentioned are the most used.
Once you've taken the (admittedly sometimes considerable) time to break your information down in this way, it becomes very easy to reuse content you've already written and link topics to other topics in whatever way makes the most sense. When you author by DITA standards, you separate your content from your formatting. This allows you to, for example, publish the same content into HTML format, tweak it a bit, and then publish it into PDF format.
DITA was originally created by IBM, who after three years of work on the structure released it to the public for free. It is now released by the OASIS consortium as an open-source standard.
For more information about DITA, check out Publishing Smarter's great DITA Primer.
