Recent DITA tool interoperability problem

["Beims Bob" <bob.beims@freescale.com>]

DITA Adoption TC;

We've recently experienced a situation in the DITA TC Semiconductor Information Design Subcommittee (SIDSC) that I wanted to pass along to you. It represents a scenario that mitigates against easy adoption of DITA, and thus presents an opportunity for some sort of best practices training to avoid it.

Here's the scenario:

1. I created a template for meeting minutes, using the Syntext Serna editor and posted it to the SC documents repository (see http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/dita-sidsc/document.php?document_id=28347). I used the base information type of "topic" for the template.
2. The template was downloaded by one of the SC members so that she could use FrameMaker 8 to capture minutes from a teleconference.
3. FrameMaker 8 told her that the file is not valid.
4. When this issue was raised during the next SC teleconference, I downloaded the file and opened it with oXygen 9.3 to check it, and was told by that editor that the file is valid.
5. As I was doing that, another member of the SC fiddled with the file using some other editor, and found that by removing the <related-links> stuff, the file would open in FrameMaker 7.2.

Hmmm... this scenario says that interoperability via an open standard may not be as easy as we'd hoped. Here we've got four different DITA-compliant editors that disagree on the validity of a DITA file.

 

Your thoughts?

Respectfully,
Bob Beims

Chair, OASIS DITA TC SIDSC

Applications Engineer, Staff Principal
Microcontroller Solutions Group
Freescale Semiconductor, Inc.

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