Document Type Definition (DTD)
Description
A DTD acts as a blueprint for XML-based documents, helping organizations maintain structure, consistency and interoperability across complex content ecosystems. It defines the building blocks of a document – including elements, relationships and data types – and validates content against these predefined rules.
When a document is validated against a DTD, the system checks that all elements and attributes comply with the defined structure, ensuring the document is accurate, complete and compliant with internal or industry standards. DTDs are widely used in structured content authoring environments such as DITA and are often implemented within Component Content Management Systems (CCMS) like Tridion Docs. They provide a reliable foundation for creating, reusing and managing content that must meet specific regulatory or technical requirements.
Example use cases
- Validation: Ensure files comply with a defined structure and set of rules.
- Exchange: Establish standardized formats for information shared between systems or organizations.
- Templates: Simplify document creation and reduce formatting errors.
- Interoperability: Enable seamless data exchange across platforms, applications and content repositories.
- Metadata: Define and validate metadata for digital assets like images, videos and forms.
Key benefits
RWS perspective
RWS helps enterprises create and manage structured, validated content that meets global standards. Using Tridion Docs, organizations can implement DTDs to define, validate and enforce consistent document structures across technical, regulatory and multilingual content.
Our Human + Technology approach combines content architecture expertise with intelligent automation – helping teams streamline authoring, improve quality assurance and ensure compliance from creation to publication.