DITA TC Meeting minutes Tuesday, 05 December 2006

["Yas Etessam" <yas.etessam@xmetal.com>]

DITA TC Meeting (Conference Call)
Date:  Tuesday, 05 December 2006
Time:  08:00am - 09:00am PT

1. Roll call
-  we have quorum
-  Don Day asks for scribe, Yas Etessam to take minutes
-  followed agenda on DITA TC Wiki
http://wiki.oasis-open.org/dita/FrontPage
-  review minutes
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/200611/msg00041.html  (28 Nov)
-  minor corrections to minutes
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/200611/msg00042.html
- approved minutes from previous meeting and minor corrections, accepted
by acclamation

2. Follow up on "Use of standardized prefixes when  incorporating
foreign vocabularies"
- no update

3. Ongoing review of 1.1 drafts:

- action completed: Don Day and Michael Priestley published updated
- drafts with comments/feedback incorporated
- Michael posted 1.1 draft onto the documents section
- dtd update links and xsd updates links have been added to the wiki
- Michael's update on 1.1 drafts has had no feedback, some outstanding
questions still need to be addressed
- Michael asked TC for direction/approval on following issues

http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/200611/msg00038.html

A. Transitional topics currently located after bookmap in the DITA map
section.
- Michael  asks for approval to move up transitional topic after the
information typing section.
- JoAnn Hackos agrees that transitional text affects more than just
bookmap.
- agreed, Michael  to move bookmap after information typing

B.  Data extensibility topic is located in common metadata elements
- some mention of the data element in the metadata context is necessary
but wants to move the majority of the topic into the specialization
section
- agreed, Michael to move topic

C.  Whenever there was a list of mixed elements/attributes, MP was using
an @ sign to indicate attributes.   Its not a documented convention in
the specification.
- consensus that its fine to leave in the @ signs without documenting
the convention

D.  Examples in the architectural spec
- Michael wants to validate that adding more examples is valuable.
Examples are "nice to have" but not mandatory and shouldn't block the
spec.

E. Translation/Formatting elements
- JoAnn asks where Robert Anderson's table of block/inline formatted
elements belong.  Table will be used by translation centres to create
tables for handling phrase markup.
- Michael to include as an Appendix with caveats that formatting is
provisional and not necessary categorically an intrinsic property of the
element.  For example, <shortdesc> and <abstract> these elements take on
the same block/inline properties as their peers.  When <abstract> is a
peer to block it is block and when it is a peer to text, it is inline.
- Michael will include the topic with appropriate wording, and check
with Robert about the exact title.

4. Conref recursion order

- Michael and Paul Grosso had offline discussion "What happens when you
have a chain of conrefs and different domains at different points on the
processing chain?"
- order is signification if performing generalization on the fly (spec
recommends generalization but doesn't require)
- Example

A topic with highlighting domain
B topic
C topic with highlighting domain

A conrefs to B
B conrefs to C

It matters which order the conref is resolved.
If we resolve the last pair first starting from the final target, we
lose the highlighting information.
If we do it in the reverse order, and resolve from A to C, then the
information gets preserved.

Michael says as long as we start from the source recursively towards the
target, we'll always be folding things into the calling context which
guarantees content to be valid as possible.

If we start from the final destination, we need to meet all requirements
in the intermediary form and will throw away tags that do not need to be
thrown away in the final form.

Initially, TC thought that the conref resolution sequence doesn't matter
but it does matter.  Edge case but it does matter which sequence.  MP
suggests using the sequence that starts at the beginning.

Erik Hennum asks whether type information is always thrown away when you
move down the chain.  Potentially could specialize during the
resolution.

Michael says issues haven't been thrashed out fully and thinks it might
dangerous to partially generalize across the board and confusing to be
inconsistent.  Don't want situation where we sometimes keep the
semantics and other times, throw the semantics thrown away.

Erik asks whether the same issue applies to conref from specialized
topics?  That would put you at risk for the same issues.   Expressing a
required sequence could instead be expressed by saying "the semantics of
the source needs to be maintained through" rather than committing to
people using this particular sequence.

Don suggest continuing discussion on the list.

5. How to "expand" nested references in a bookmap?
 http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/200611/msg00040.html (Grosso)

- Paul Grosso asked for guidance on this edge case.
- Don says that when a chapter reference is made, whatever topic is
pointed to is cast as a chapter in terms of processing
- Erik states that if the file that contains topics contains nested
references in a map, then the nesting issues come to the foreground.
- Erik doesn't know which answer is correct. Treat the nested content as
the role? On a basis of usability, could depend on whether somebody
wants to set up their chapters into a single file.
- Paul says with standard dita map, we assume that all first level
references will be formatted in the same way.
But if a topicref is already formatted as a structure, does/should the
role get kept?  No urgency, this is an edge case.


6. Translation best practices meeting
- status on yesterday's meeting
- JoAnn went through Paul's' comments and Gershon/JoAnn are going to
make changes to the comments about indexing- JoAnn asks if anybody has
any comments on translation memory best practices.  No comments so far.
- JoAnn to get the document updated this week.


6.  Meetings for this month:
-  Next week's meeting Dec 12th
-  Will decide on the 12th whether to have a meeting on the 19th

7.  Automotive Industry Subcommittee
- Don asks about general interest in starting this subcommittee
- JoAnn has a contact from Toyota who has implemented DITA and
interested people in the trucking industry
- Don wants to foster Japanese use of DITA
- JoAnn replies that much of the documentation originates in Japan
- JoAnn to pass contacts to Don
- Don stresses importance of fostering new subcommittees to increase
uptake of DITA in different industries

8.  Telecommunications Subcommittee
- Don says the notion of a telecommunications industry subcommittee is
still open