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Best practices for conditions

Posted on 12.02.16

Advanced reuse in DITA Lesson 1: Using conditions Best practices for conditions

 

Do not filter sentence fragments

As described in the basic course on reusing elements, do not use filtering on anything smaller than a sentence.

It’s better to have two instances of an entire sentence that are grammatically correct (and will remain correct when translated) than to risk ending up with poorly constructed—or even non-sensical—sentences.

Communicate your choices

Create a style guide or some other form of documentation so that everyone on your team, organization, or company uses conditional attributes and values consistently.

Make sure you have agreement on:

  • How and why everyone uses the audience, platform, product, and otherprops attributes.
  • The precise values everyone uses with those attributes and the meaning of each value. Remember that case matters when comparing attribute values with the val attribute in ditaval file.

Consider specialization

If there are not enough conditional attributes for your needs, or if the names of the attributes do not fit with how you are using them, consider using the DITA specialization mechanisms to create additional conditional attributes.

Contributors
  • Simon Bate
  • Jake Campbell
  • Gretyl Kinsey
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