Conditional processing, also known as profiling, is the filtering or flagging of information based on processing-time criteria.
DITA tries to implement conditional processing in a semantically meaningful way: rather than allowing arbitrary values to accumulate in a document over time in a general-purpose processing attribute, with meaning only to the original author, we encourage the authoring of metadata using specific metadata attributes on content. These metadata values can then be leveraged by any number of processes, including filtering, flagging, search, and indexing, rather than being suitable for filtering only.
For a topic or topicref, the audience, platform, and product metadata can be expressed with attributes on the topic or topicref element or with elements within the topic prolog or topicmeta element. While the metadata elements are more expressive, the meaning of the values is the same, and can be used in coordination: for example, the prolog elements can fully define the audiences for a topic, and then metadata attributes can be used within the content to identify parts that apply to only some of those audiences.
The values in the audience attribute may also be used to reference a more complete description of an audience in an audience element. Use the name of the audience in the audience element when referring to the same audience in an audience attribute.
The audience attribute takes a blank-delimited list of values, which may or may not match the name value of any audience elements.
Each attribute takes zero or more space-delimited string values. For example, you can use the product attribute to identify that an element applies to two particular products.
<p audience="administrator">Set the configuration options: <ul> <li product="extendedprod">Set foo to bar</li> <li product="basicprod extendedprod">Set your blink rate</li> <li>Do some other stuff</li> <li platform="Linux">Do a special thing for Linux</li> </ul> </p>
<prop att="audience" val="administrator" action="flag" > <startflag>ADMIN</startflag> </prop> <prop att="product" val="extendedprod" action="exclude"/>
At output time, the paragraph is flagged, and the first list item is excluded (since it applies to extendedprod), but the second list item is still included (even though it does apply to extendedprod, it also applies to basicprod, which was not excluded).
When deciding whether to flag a particular element, a process should evaluate each value. Wherever a value that has been set as flagged appears in its attribute (for example, audience="ADMIN") the process should add the flag. When multiple flags apply to a single element, multiple flags should be output, typically in the order they are encountered.
Flagging could be done using text (for example, bold text against a colored background) or using images. When the same element evaluates as both flagged and filtered (for example, flagged because of an audience attribute value and filtered because of its product attribute values), the element should be filtered.
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OASIS DITA Architectural Specification v1.1 -- Committee Draft 02, 8 May 2007
Copyright © OASIS Open 2005, 2007. All Rights Reserved.