DITA Best Practices : Identifying the Information Type

Concept, task and reference topics contain different types of content. Concept topics contain explanations, task topics contain procedural steps, and reference topics contain tabular look-up information.  

An important skill of an author working in a DITA environment is typing information correctly into information types.

Of the three base DITA information types:

• Concept topics are used for overviews of tasks or   overviews of reference information. They tend to be short and simple.
• Task topics   contain procedural steps.
• Reference   topics detail properties and other reference (as opposed to narrative)   information, typically in tabular form.

Such a set of topics would be associated using a reltable, so that the topics would be linked or associated in the deliverable document. A typical procedure will require a concept topic and a task topic, and may require a reference topic.

While task information is generally easy to identify, it can be difficult to distinguish concept from reference information. Table 1 explains some of the characteristics of concept topics compared with reference topics.