@Tom – The DITA OT already has a default presentation for the entries in relationship tables. Those are added as links at the end of the topic in the Related Tasks, Related Concepts, Related Reference, and Related Information lists. Cliff’s idea of putting the links in a “sidebar” would just be a matter of how to define the “sidebar” and directing the current processing to place those links in that area. I haven’t really looked at how to do this, but it may not be difficult if you’re familiar with XSLT.

Using a relationship table, put the links in context in a sidebar. You could even add a “Definitions” heading at the end, where each term that needs to be defined could be linked to its definition.

When I had time to beta test Flare, I don’t even think relationship tables were implemented yet. I’m not sure that there is much difference but as Flare supports more output formats than the DITA OT, there has to be unique implementations for each unique type. I have to believe that Flare has to do things to process relationship tables that are different from the OT but not necessarily better or worse. If I gave the impression that the differences were significant, that’s my bad.

BTW, I would have never thought to have had a 4th column in a reltable as a hint to the writer, so I applaud that use case. I would have used it as a task to task relationship column (with possible alteration of the linking attributes to prevent incorrect linkages to the concept and reference topics). I’ve always looked at reltables as a method to express relationships among topics that don’t have a navigational relationship.

What I’m most interested in is the day when Flare has full authoring support for DITA, which is still to come.