June PDX DITA Book Club recap: Metadata and Conditional Processing

We discussed chapter 8: Metadata and chapter 9: Conditional Processing of DITA Best Practices at the June 22nd meeting of the PDX DITA Book Club. Attendees included a new member from Viewpoint and DITA enthusiasts from Jive Software, NetApp, and Daimler.

book club

These two chapters were a perfect pair to discuss together. Our group members had great tips for using metadata and conditional processing and plenty of examples of how they use them day-to-day.

  • If you have a long topic, instead of putting all of your <indexterm> elements in the <prolog>, you can put them nearer to the information that the index entry is describing to make that information easier to find.
  • Set the translate attribute to “no” for items that shouldn’t be translated or that will cause issues with translation services. Our members have used this for superscripts, part numbers, and button UI text that shouldn’t be translated.
  • Stan Rhodes made a great point about publication dates and the <prolog> element. It’s possible that the publication dates you use internally for a topic are not the same as the dates you want to use in your published topic. Consider whether the publication date you use in the <prolog> element is the one you want associated with your published topic.
  • Even though you can add conditional processing attributes to rel tables and inside topics, most of the group members preferred to add them to the <topicref>, if possible. It’s easier to find them and keep track of them that way.
  • We discussed whether or not any members dealt with condition sprawl, a term coined by the book writers to describe when a team has multiple conditions for the same purpose. We all agreed that condition sprawl would probably be more of a problem in large teams than in small teams, which was the perfect segue to PDX DITA quarterly meeting that followed!

Couldn’t make it to the meeting but have something to add? How does your team use metadata? 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: August 24, 2016 from 5:00 to 6:00 pm
What: Chapter 10 of DITA Best Practices
RSVP: Email docs@jivesoftware.com

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