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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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