Unscientific collection of note/@type tallies in IBM content

["Robert D Anderson" <robander@us.ibm.com>]

Big caveat for these numbers -- it comes from a set of over 200,000 topics that I've gotten over the years as test data, so relatively speaking it's just a small sample of IBM DITA content. Much of the data is older (so, no type="trouble", which came in with DITA 1.3).

In some cases my test data includes multiple versions of the same content (different releases and/or different languages). For example: across over 200,000 topics I found exactly 4 uses of type="fastpath". One of those was in content delivered to customers. The other three were from three different versions of internal education modules for the tools I support.

Interesting data point: for basic notes, authors usually leave off @type, so the biggest use of @type across this data is actually type="other". I have not gone through those values to see what @othertype values are used; from the 10 or 20 I scanned in the search results, I saw a lot with othertype="Notes" (also saw "Tips").

With all that in mind:
Total <note> elements: 92,926

Of those:
Untyped (no @type attribute): 70,112

@type=
attention: 906
caution: 213
danger: 10
fastpath: 4
important: 1771
note: 1881
notice: 13
remember: 188
restriction: 387
tip: 2214
trouble: 0
warning: 59
other: 15,168

Regards, Robert D. Anderson DITA-OT lead and Co-editor DITA 1.3 specification, Digital Services Group
E-mail: robander@us.ibm.com Digital Services Group
11501 BURNET RD,, TX, 78758-3400, AUSTIN, USA