Hi all,

We have a requirement to deliver context-sensitive content based on metadata on elements within a topic. One output is embedded into a third-party app and the correct content for each context is shown based on the metadata attributes. A custom XSLT is required to produce the right schema (i.e. we bypass DITA-OT processing entirely).

In PDF and XHTML, we need to show the content of all elements, with some visual way of describing their contexts. We use DITA-OT processing for these outputs.

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hi (and apologies for the long text - it just did not work out shorter),

i work @ a company that creates web applications for government administrations (before that we delivered client-software). this software is used by a multitude of different stakeholders and therefore demands several types of documentation. our software is very feature-rich and highly configurable, our web interfaces are complex. so we need a flexible solution for a documentation that can easily be adjusted to fit different configurations.

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The DITA design has a unified content reuse mechanism by which an element can replace itself with the content of a like element elsewhere, either in the current topic or in a separate topic that shares the same content models. The distinction between reusable content and reusing content, often a problem for authors trying to use file and text entities, disappears: Any element with an ID, in any DITA topic, is reusable by conref.

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Most information can be broken down into topics (headings and content). However, if your information requires a more seamless flow of information across topic boundaries, don't use this architecture.

Create specialized topics when you have a restrictive category of topics that you want to keep consistent and that your users want to distinguish from other categories. Create specialized domains when you have a set of elements that you want available across several of your topic types. Be sure to specialize from the correct base: For example, categories of reference topics should specialize <reference>, categories of tasks should specialize <task>, and domain types should always specialize either <topic> or another domain type.

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