DITA Technical Committee Meeting Minutes: 7 December 2010

["Bruce Nevin (bnevin)" <bnevin@cisco.com>]

 

DITA Technical Committee Meeting Minutes: 7 December 2010
 
Chaired by Don Day <donday@bga.com>
Minutes recorded by Bruce Nevin <bnevin@cisco.com>
 
The DITA Technical Committee met on Tuesday, 7  December 2010 at 08:00am PT for 18 minutes.
8:00-8:05 Roll call
  o Regrets: JoAnn Hackos
  o Quorum was established.

STANDING BUSINESS:

Approve minutes from previous business meeting:
  o http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201011/msg00053.html (Eberlein)
  o Don moved, Kris seconded, approved by acclamation.
Subcommittee/liaison reports:
  o OASIS DITA Help Subcommittee next week
  o OASIS DITA for Enterprise Business Documents Subcommittee
  o OASIS DITA Technical Communication Subcommittee
  o OASIS DITA Pharmaceutical Content Subcommittee

BUSINESS:

1. ITEM: DITA 1.2 prep/announce status

  o OASIS response on PR 
OASIS expects to issue the press release Tuesday
CLOSED

  o Errata page (ie, "Incorrect xref in DITA spec source files ")

ACTION: Kris: log this in a properly named errata file, linked on the Front Page under Working Documents/DITA 1.3on the Front Page, and include in it the list of typos that Robert opened.

  o Prep status of official materials
Robert: In Mary's hands, should be up on the site now or presently will be. 

CLOSED

  o Discuss use of Stan's build script information
Adoption TC might consider announcing this. 

ACTION: Stan: add information about building just the base

  o Discuss what next for announcement promotion?

The question concerns timing relative to the holidays, and whether further promotion is for the Adoption TC. Kris: propose a joint seminar with the Adoption TC, as an OASIS-promoted event. Members would have to put in the time to prepare a presentation. Thilo: good idea, explain what its for and what its business value is. Now that Gershon is no longer on TC, Kris is official liaison to Adoption TC. Bruce: Does this explicitly relate to the discussion about perceived complexity? Yes, good idea. Thilo: explore this in the survey. Don: take these topics up in their places in this agenda.

ACTION: Kris: take this proposal to the Adoption TC.
ACTION: Don: when response of Adoption TC is clear, take this to Mary.

2. ITEM: Question about syntax of @anchorref

  o http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201011/msg00042.html (Eberlein)

CLOSED

3a. New ITEM: Entity declarations in DITA 1.2 constraint modules (Su-Laine):  

  o http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201012/msg00021.html (Yeo)

Many element declarations are in entities. It appears that every element used in a constraint module must be defined there, even if defined elsewhere.

Robert confirmed that entities used in constraint modules must be defined in the constraint module itself. Nobody is happy that this is required, but it is due to fundamental limitations of DTDs.

3b. Suffix for constraint entities
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201012/msg00008.html

Suffix & syntax for constraint modules: DTDs and examples appear not to conform to spec. Robert: should be listed as errata.

ACTION: Robert: determine what is correct and reflect it in the errata page.

4. New ITEM: Perceptions of DITA complexity

  o Issue was initially brought up at last week's report on DITA Europe
  o http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201012/msg00024.html

The architecture enables simple use of DITA, but DITA looks complex. Our messaging is problematic. 

Could Doug Gorman's "simple DITA" schema be treated as a constraint module and thereby made more officially supported? As constructed, it does not conform to the spec. Can one construct a conforming declaration set that reflects the same constraints? Probably yes. There may be other issues. Such implementation would make clear what is in the schema supported and what is not.

Are the instructions for implementers for this sort of exercise clear enough, or does the implementation process seem too complex? The Adoption TC needs examples and other materials to give to users.

People mean different things. Some mean can't find the things I'm looking for. Some mean I don't like DITA. Stan: our "competitors" are claiming complexity of DITA as marketing FUD. There are non-authoring uses of DITA that some (e.g. Paul Trotter) would like us to support. In Europe, document production is controlled by  trades, here tech writing is more universal and groups like STC get the word out effectively to implementers. Tech Pub managers say DITA 1.1 was hard enough and is working, why do I want to take on DITA 1.2? Unless specific steps are taken a lot more complexity is exposed with migration.

Kris: propose a wiki page to collect the variety of meanings of "complexity" and gather people's ideas. Don: Should we invite the public to comment on what they find hard to grasp? Kris: How do we do this fruitfully? 

ACTION: Don: put up a wiki page on the front page and seed it with the anecdotal information we have now.
ACTION: All: Everyone participating in the email discussion should add to this page, and that fruitful discussion should continue.

5. ITEM: Continued: review of packaging survey (Buchholz and Hackos action)

  o http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201011/msg00013.html (Buchholz update) deferred to next week.

Ongoing checks:

1. Lessons learned
2. dita.xml.org page on build scripts (Stan)
  o http://dita.xml.org/wiki/dita-12-specification-building-specification-subsets
  o Ready for use (reported 30 Nov 2010).

8:50-8:55 Announcements/Opens

Holiday suspension: Cancel meetings on 12/28 and 1/5. 

ACTION: All: in email, discuss possible cancellation of 1/21 meeting.

8:55 Adjourn