April PDX DITA Book Club meeting recap: Linking

We discussed Chapter 7: Linking of DITA Best Practices at the April 20th meeting of the PDX DITA Book Club. Attendees included DITA enthusiasts from Jive Software, ADP, Daimler, and PSU’s Technical Writing program.

Here are the highlights!

book club

Inline links
We discussed how behavior influences inline links. Readers today are accustomed to inline links because of sites that use them heavily, like Wikipedia. Since readers have become somewhat immune to them, they are neither particularly disruptive nor do they appear that much more important than the surrounding text.

Still, we agreed that it is best to be selective when using inline links and to take advantage of the automatic ways you can create links with DITA, such as the sequence collection type. Toni’s team even implemented an “avoid inline links” policy.

Rel tables
Some of us use them; some of us don’t; and a few of us would like to try.
Advice for starting small with rel tables: They can be added to sub-ditamaps, as long as that sub-ditamap is above all of the links in your rel table. Putting rel tables at the sub-ditamap level also keeps them portable.

Collection types
The collection type we all thought would be the most useful (and some of us take advantage of) is sequence, especially for very long processes and wizards.

Scope attribute
The scope attribute on a link tells your .xslt where to look for the link. The peer attribute is useful when the topic you are linking to is not currently published, so the link will not break your build.

Couldn’t make it to the meeting but have something to add? Do you want to tell about your linking strategy or expound your love of rel tables (looking at you, Josh!)? Discuss in the comments!

More people are coming to every meeting! You should join us for the next PDX DITA Book Club meeting:
Where: Jive Software, 915 SW Stark Street, Portland, OR
When: May 18, 2016 from 5:00 to 6:00 pm
What: Chapter 5 of DITA Best Practices
RSVP: Email docs@jivesoftware.com

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