🚀 go-pugleaf

Hi David...

Yes .. that's one of the cool things about DITA is that you don't have to use the default element names, you can make up whatever element names you want to use as long as they can be mapped back to the core DITA topic-based structure. This is the concept of specialization. In your hypothetical model ..

<component>
    <widget>
      <bizarro>Blah</bizarro>
      <fruitcake>Fred</fruitcake>
    </widget>
</component>

both component and widget would each be a "topic" element, bizarro would be a "title" and and shortcake would be a "shortdesc". Hmm .. although since a "topic" always needs a "title", it may be necessary to define a title for the component topic. If you could specialize the "dita" element, you could map component to that, but I don't think they allow specialization of "dita". Without seeing your real model, or one that provides the right structure with the names changed to protect the innocent, we could determine if it is really possible to create a "widget" specialization.

My point is, don't get caught up in the element names that are presented by default DITA. If you can make use of the features that DITA provides, you may be able to use DITA even if your model seems to be completely different.

Cheers,

...scott