All DITA DTDs fall back to the original information type, known simply as "topic". The topic DTD contains all of the basic building blocks necessary for documentation, such as keywords, phrases, paragraphs, and lists. Each of these elements contains an attribute that says, "I am a topic's keyword" or "I am a topic's ordered list."
Translation tools, as with any other DITA-aware tool, must look at this attribute instead of looking at the element name -- even if they only expect to work with the base topic DTD. They should never test an element's name. As long as tools are designed with this characteristic, they will be able to handle any current or future DITA DTD. This is important because most articles will not actually be written using the basic topic DTD.
