XSD Topic Type Shell Tutorial Step 1: Copy Existing Shell

Create a directory in your workspace to hold the new document type shell, e.g., workspace/myTopicShell/xsd.

Find the file topic.xsd in the technical content area of the standard DITA XSD distribution (schema/technicalContent/xsd/topic.xsd in the files packaged with the Open Toolkit) and copy it into the workspace/myTopicShell/xsd directory as file myTopic.xsd.

The DITA 1.2 schema distribution includes two document type shells for <topic>: topic.xsd in the technical documentation area, and basetopic.xsd in the base area. The topic.xsd shell integrates all the different topic domains that are part of the standard DITA vocabulary. The basetopic.xsd only integrates the highlighting, indexing, and utility domains.

In the myTopicShell directory, create a new XML document named mytopic-test-xsd.xml that uses myTopic.xsd as its document type with this content:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<topic xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
 xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="xsd/myTopic.xsd"
 id="topic-1">
  <title>Topic title</title>
  <body>
    <p>Topic paragraph</p>
  </body>
</topic>

This document serves as your test document to verify that you haven't made any syntax errors in the new shell.

Open this document in your XML editor (e.g., in OxygenXML) and validate it. It should be valid.