API documentation with DITA

[nicksona]

I am trying to make api reference with dita, but I have read this, but there is written

For example, API documentation is a particular kind of reference information and requires more specific rules and descriptive markup than a generic reference type. DITA lets you define a new type and reuse the processing of the base type (providing new processing only for different requirements of the new type). As a result, topics from different domains with different markup and markup rules can be built together into one help file, Web site, or book

and didn`t understood it(can I create new DITA element by using DTD, souldn`t this make the DITA XML invalid). I also looked here but am not sure if there already exist such elements for the creation of API reference

[Radu]

Hi,

DITA has support for specializations, meaning that there is an officially approved way of creating new DTDs to add new DITA elements to your vocabulary.
Eliot Kimber has a tutorial in which he describes various types of specializations:

http://www.xiruss.org/tutorials/dita-specialization/

Once a DTD specialization is made, it can be bundled as a DITA Open Toolkit plugin and integrated in the DITA Open Toolkit used by Oxygen for publishing and validation:

https://www.oxygenxml.com/doc/versions/ ... ation.html

Regards,
Radu