Are there best practices for documenting and managing content variants in DITA?

November 10, 2023
|By Bryan Tipper

Documenting and managing content variants in DITA XML involves several best practices to ensure efficiency, consistency, and clarity in your documentation process. These practices help organizations maintain high-quality multilingual content while streamlining translation workflows and enhancing overall content management.

Use Profiling Attributes

Profiling attributes, such as language, audience, and product version, play a crucial role in DITA. Employ these attributes to classify and manage content variants effectively. By using conditional processing attributes like conkeyref and conref, you can control which variants are included, making your content more adaptable to different contexts.

Implement Translation Memories

Leverage translation memories (TMs) to identify and reuse previously translated content segments. This practice enhances translation efficiency, maintains consistency across languages, and ensures that content variants remain synchronized. TMs help reduce translation costs and improve the quality of multilingual documentation.

Establish Review and Approval Processes

Implement continuous review processes and automated checks to maintain the relevance and accuracy of your content. By setting up regular review cycles with subject matter experts, and using automation for version control and content validation, you can ensure that content variants are up-to-date and error-free.

Example:

Here’s an example of implementing best practices for managing content variants in DITA:


<topic id="product_description">
  <title>Product Description</title>
  <body>
    <p prof="language=es">Este es el producto para el público hispanohablante.</p>
    <p>This is the product description for the general audience.</p>
  </body>
  <alerts>
    <check type="review" frequency="quarterly" />
    <check type="version" expected="3.0" />
  </alerts>

In this example, profiling attributes are used to classify content variants based on language. The content undergoes quarterly reviews, and version control checks are in place to ensure consistency.