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DITA: Related Links

Related links are links that provide additional information about your topic. Usually related links point to web resources rather than other links within your DITA project.

DITA: Related Links

It's best to use relationship tables for links, but you can also manually add related links at the bottom of your topics. Here's a sample:

<related-links>
    <link href="sample1.dita"><linktext>Sample 1 Page</linktext></link>
    <link href="sample2.dita"/>
    <link href="sample3.dita"/>
   </related-links>

If you're using keys instead of direct links, you would write it like this:

<related-links>
    <link keyref="sample1"/>
    <link keyref="sample2"/>
    <link keyref="sample3"/>
   </related-links>

Manually inserted related links like this are useful when you want to link out to resources on the web related to the topic.

If you're linking to content on the web, DITA can't pull in the titles automatically, so you need to specify them through the linktext element. You also need to add format="html" and scope="external" attributes to the link.

<related-links>
    <link href="http://nytimes.com" format="html" scope="external"><linktext>New York Times</linktext></link>
    <link format="html" scope="external" href="washingtonpost.com"><linktext>Washington Post</linktext></link>
    <link format="html" scope="external" href="huffingtonpost.com"><linktext>Huffingtonpost</linktext></link>
   </related-links>

About Tom Johnson

Tom Johnson

I'm an API technical writer based in the Seattle area. On this blog, I write about topics related to technical writing and communication — such as software documentation, API documentation, AI, information architecture, content strategy, writing processes, plain language, tech comm careers, and more. Check out my API documentation course if you're looking for more info about documenting APIs. Or see my posts on AI and AI course section for more on the latest in AI and tech comm.

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