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Subject: Reminder of DITA mission
OASIS requires each Technical Committee to have a mission statement to help guide its activity. Whenever discussion visits those fundamentals, it's appropriate for the Chair to recall the mission statement and other principles to which the committee agreed: From the DITA TC Charter: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/dita/charter.php DITA is an XML-based specification for modular and extensible topic-based information. DITA provides a model for defining and processing new information types as specializations of existing types. From Deep Dive #1 (DITA-IntroductionBrief.ppt p. 13): http://xml.coverpages.org/dita.html#DITADeepDive Topic orientation • Discrete units of information covering a specific subject with a specific intent Topic granularity • Self-contained topics combine with other topics into information sets ... {among others} From DITA Deep Dive #2 (briefing2a.ppt p. 4): Topics are small enough to provide lots of opportunities for reuse, but large enough to be coherently authored and read. While DITA supports reuse below the topic level, this requires considerably more thought and review, since topics assembled out of smaller chunks often require editing to make them flow properly. By contrast, since topics are already organized around a single subject, you can organize a set of topics logically and get an acceptable flow between them, since transitions from subject to subject don't need to be as seamless as the explanations within a single subject. The committee accepted a mission to define a markup language in support of a particular information architecture. As Chair, my role is to remind everyone of the stated mission as a guide for healthy debate and constructive goals. Regards, -- Don Day Chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee IBM Lead DITA Architect Email: dond@us.ibm.com 11501 Burnet Rd. MS9033E015, Austin TX 78758 Phone: +1 512-838-8550 T/L: 678-8550 "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" --T.S. Eliot
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