Metadata

[julie]

Hi
What is metadata? Why do we use metadata?
What is the use of the attributes and entities?
What is DITA Table?
Regards
Julie

[Radu]

Hi Julie,

Metadata elements do not usually appear in the generated output but are used as a way to add additional information to the topics, map.
Here is a link to the three metadata categories DITA offers:
http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.1/CD ... ments.html

Attributes like "platform", "audience" are useful to filter the topic content when publishing. For example you can choose to publish only elements which have a "Linux" platform value if you want to publish the user manual only for Linux users. See more information about filters here:
http://www.oxygenxml.com/doc/ug-oxygen/ ... ation.html

Entities are usually used to reuse simple content.
For example in the DOCTYPE declaration of a task you can add the following entity:

Code: Select all

<!DOCTYPE task PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DITA Task//EN" "http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.1/OS/dtd/task.dtd"[

  <!ENTITY version '8.2'>

 ]>

In the topic XML content you will be able to use the entity reference '&version;'and in the output all occurrences will be replaced by '8.2'.
So you can change the version in one place and have it show up in many others.

DITA simpletable's are almost identical to XHTML ones, you can experiment with them to see how they appear in the generated output.

Regards,
Radu