Conditional processing, also known as profiling, is the filtering or flagging of information based on processing-time criteria. The filtering mechanism first matches against the criteria, and then takes a specified action. 

DITA provides several built-in attributes to hold the values for filter criteria for an element. These are:

• audience
• platform
• product
• otherprops
• rev (for flagging only)

It is possible, for example, to specify the platform or audience that a particular paragraph applies to. The values of these attributes can then be leveraged by any number of processes, including filtering, flagging, search, and indexing.

There is a proposal for DITA 1.1 that will enable specializers to define their own metadata attributes for use in conditionally processing content.

The architectural specification describes conditional processing at

• http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.0/archspec/condproc.html

Editors for the Architecture area:

• Bruce Esrig
• Michael Priestley