SDL LiveContent's Open, Standards-based Platform

How SDL LiveContent DITA Supports XML

XML is an open standard created by the World-Wide Web Consortium for use on the Web, in IT and throughout the publishing world. It has become the foundation for automated text and data processing, and it supported in products, applications, and tools offered by large IT companies and open source projects alike.

The use of XML in SDL LiveContent guarantees your content and your processing tools will not be locked into a proprietary format, and that there will be a large pool of people familiar with the standards and technologies on which SDL LiveContent is based.

SDL LiveContent is built on a lightweight, native XML database. Your content stays in its XML form until the instant it is formatted, filtered and displayed.

SDL LiveContent utilizes the entire family of XML related technologies including:

XQuery for search and retrieval of content from the database
XSL for transforming and formatting content
XSL-FO for rendering printed pages
XPath for locating content and metadata for processing

SDL LiveContent supports the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) right out of the box. DITA is an XML-based OASIS standard that was originally developed by IBM and then released to OASIS for ongoing development and maintenance. DITA is now widely adopted for authoring product documentation, learning and training materials, and other types of technical content. SDL LiveContent has been architected so that it can readily add support for any other XML DTD or schema, in addition to DITA.

SDL LiveContent is built on an AJAX (Asynchronous Java script and XML) communication model that provides information on-demand, and makes it easy to integrate with other Web environments. SDL LiveContent also makes use of Java, providing a cross-platform, vendor neutral development environment for integrations and extensions.