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DITA and baselines with topics that have elements with Ishconditions applied to content with xrefs

Douglas Williams

We have some people who want to use xrefs inside content that is conditionalized out, either inside topics that have been conditionalized out at the map level, using ishconditions, or (more commonly) topics that have ishconditions applied to elements that contain xrefs.

My take on it is "don't do that," both from a DITA standpoint, and from the standpoint of what works. However, I would be interested in hearing some best practices or guidance for this kind of use case that I could pass on. 
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  • It really is contingent upon the scope of the XREF. You absolutely want to avoid circumstances where XREFs point to content that is conditioned out and the validation report should flag those.

    Generally speaking, use of conditions adds complexity to your content which can result in "spaghetti code." Typically over use of conditioning is an indicator that content has not been properly chunked. Through the use of @conref you can build virtually any topic/output without use of conditions. The smaller the chunks the greater the reusability. Chunking at a very granular level comes at a cost on the design side but you reap the benefit downstream - translation leverage, etc.
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  • It really is contingent upon the scope of the XREF. You absolutely want to avoid circumstances where XREFs point to content that is conditioned out and the validation report should flag those.

    Generally speaking, use of conditions adds complexity to your content which can result in "spaghetti code." Typically over use of conditioning is an indicator that content has not been properly chunked. Through the use of @conref you can build virtually any topic/output without use of conditions. The smaller the chunks the greater the reusability. Chunking at a very granular level comes at a cost on the design side but you reap the benefit downstream - translation leverage, etc.
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