RE: DITA for Tech Standards activity

["Gershon Joseph (gerjosep)" <gerjosep@cisco.com>]

Hi Robert,

I'm pleased to see this taking off. I would like to participate. In my
mind, this SC needs to do the following:

1. Get a formal content and style definition from OASIS (We had issues
with this while working on the DITA 1.2 spec, since they have things
scattered over several documents plus a lot of it is simply
underspecified or unspecified...)

2. Create a map specialization to capture the structure of the OASIS
spec plus the metadata that's required.

3. Possibly create topic specializations if we need this (we may even
choose to have a specialized topic to represent the cover page).

4. Develop a DITA-OT plug-in for each OASIS output required (I think all
we need is PDF and XHTML or HTML5)

5. Write documentation/tutorials and package it all up.

Follow-on projects of this SC would be to do the same for other OASIS
artifacts, such as white papers (we have a plug-in that's close at the
DITA Adoption TC, but we have not documented it yet and I suspect
there's room for improvement and tweaking).

I have joined the SC.

Thanks for driving this!
Gershon

-----Original Message-----
From: Robert D Anderson [mailto:robander@us.ibm.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, July 27, 2010 6:39 PM
To: dita-techstds@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: DITA for Tech Standards activity


Hi everybody,

I'm sending this to the DITA for Tech Standards list, as well as (by
BCC)
to several people that may not be on that list but have expressed
interest.

As most of you know, one roadblock to using DITA for OASIS standards is
that there's no clearly defined way right now to encode some required
information. That info includes most of the information on the cover
page,
as well as a couple of other items like how to recognize appendix
sections.
Seth Park and I have signed up to work on this, but would like to get
input
from this group on the work as we go.

The most urgent goal is to get a defined, generic way to mark up an
OASIS
spec, which allows us to mark up the DITA specification itself but can
also
cover other OASIS specifications. If possible, it should also cover
other
specifications such as those from W3C, but in my opinion that could also
be
a follow-on activity.

Thoughts? I'll also encourage those not on the SC list already to join
up
here (as a member or observer); that's the only way that you'll be able
to
track future discussion:
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=dita-techstds

Thanks -

Robert D Anderson
IBM Authoring Tools Development
Chief Architect, DITA Open Toolkit