RE: [dita] Use of "claims to be DITA aware": Why I Said It Like That

["Ogden, Jeff" <jogden@ptc.com>]

This entire discussion hopeless. It is the reason that the TC previously
agreed that we could not and would not produce the sort of detailed
conformance statement for DITA 1.2 that we had once hoped.  We should
just stop trying.  If we continue to try to go down this road, we will
never finish.

And just to be clear, all of the revised wording that has been suggested
by various people seems unacceptable to me.

I do think that Eliot understands what needs to be done and has written
some quite clear statements about it.  And I want to thank him for that.

I do think that asking vendors that claim DITA awareness to list the
DITA features they do and/or don't support would be a good thing.  We
had that in the conformance statement at one point.  Why did we take it
out?

Such a list would be a step in the right direction, but it won't be
perfect until the DITA spec. has its own list of required and optional
features for different categories of implementation.  That isn't going
to happen in the short run.  But a vendor supplied list of supported and
unsupported features would still be a step in the right direction. 

    -Jeff

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Su-Laine Yeo [mailto:su-laine.yeo@justsystems.com]
> Sent: Monday, February 22, 2010 9:03 PM
> To: tself@hyperwrite.com; dita
> Subject: RE: [dita] Use of "claims to be DITA aware": Why I Said It
> Like That
> 
> Hi Tony,
> 
> Regarding differentiation between DITA-aware and specialization-aware,
> I
> was hoping to cover that in the second sentence which says, "They must
> also must also document procedures to support creating arbitrary valid
> documents using arbitrary DITA specializations." Maybe this could be
> clarified by saying instead, "Tools that claim to support
> specialization
> must also document procedures for creating arbitrary valid documents
> using arbitrary DITA specializations." BTW this procedure could be
> "contact us for a quote."
> 
> > Would the requirement that the tool provide access to all elements
> and
> > attributes be too restrictive for both "abstraction layer" authoring
> tools
> > and very specialised authoring tools (such as an authoring tool
> designed for
> > creating reference topics only)?
> 
> These tools could still claim to partially support DITA authoring,
> which
> is what they aspire to do.
> I must say though that I'm not confident that a conformance statement
> can outsmart vendor marketing spin.
> 
> Su-Laine
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tony Self [mailto:tself@hyperwrite.com]
> Sent: Monday, February 22, 2010 5:07 PM
> To: Su-Laine Yeo; 'dita'
> Subject: RE: [dita] Use of "claims to be DITA aware": Why I Said It
> Like
> That
> 
> Hi Su-Laine (and all)
> 
> Your revised text doesn't allow for the differentiation between
> DITA-aware
> and specialisation-aware. Maybe the text could be separated into two
> pieces,
> starting with (respectively):
> 
> "Tools that claim to support base content model DITA authoring..."
> and
> "Tools that claim to support specialised content model DITA
> authoring..."
> 
> Would the requirement that the tool provide access to all elements and
> attributes be too restrictive for both "abstraction layer" authoring
> tools
> and very specialised authoring tools (such as an authoring tool
> designed
> for
> creating reference topics only)? I think it *would* be too
restrictive,
> but
> I can't immediately think of another way of expressing the conformance
> requirement.
> 
> Tony Self
> 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Su-Laine Yeo [mailto:su-laine.yeo@justsystems.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, 23 February 2010 11:17 AM
> To: dita; tony.self@hyperwrite.com
> Subject: RE: [dita] Use of "claims to be DITA aware": Why I Said It
> Like
> That
> 
> Here's a revised proposal with tweaks to more directly address "output
> as DITA" claims:
> 
> "Tools that claim to support DITA authoring, or claim to support
> producing output as DITA, must allow authors to create arbitrary valid
> documents using the complete base DITA vocabulary, i.e. all DITA topic
> and map types, including all base element and attribute types. They
> must
> also must also document procedures to support creating arbitrary valid
> documents using arbitrary DITA specializations. Tools that claim
> partial
> support of DITA authoring or partial support of producing output as
> DITA, but do not support creation of arbitrary valid documents using
> the
> complete base DITA vocabulary, must document what parts of the
> vocabulary are not supported."
> 
> 
> Su-Laine
> 
> 
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