DITA FAQ is the core content for the DITA FAQ provided by IBM on developerWorks.

HTML version of the DITA FAQ

This example gives a demonstration of topic specialization by defining a simple FAQ topic.

The purpose of the FAQ topic is to model a list of frequently asked questions. The FAQ topic uses a specialization of the simpletable element to model the list so multiple types of information can be tracked for each FAQ item.

The example includes the DTD module, an XSL module for generating HTML output, and a sample data file.

Open the demo source file ditafaq.xml in a Mozilla-class browser to see the effect of CSS styling on literally rendered DITA XML elements.

Open the demo file in IE6 or IE7 to see the effect of a DITA XML topic rendered by XSLT directly in the browser.

CAVEAT

The FAQ example is provided only as an example of topic specialization and not as a standard topic type within the DITA architecture. Other design approaches are possible.

For instance, you could model a FAQ list as a domain specialization of the simpletable element. This approach would let you provide a FAQ list within topic types such as concept or reference.

Or, you could model a FAQ list with each FAQ item as a separate topic. This approach would make it easy to assemble different kinds of FAQ lists from a pool of FAQ items.

The design for a FAQ information type would need to be validated with a community.