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Subject: RE: [dita] FW: Feedback for Survey
Hi everyone, I am still not clear on what the goals are either for this survey, or of the repackaging effort in general. Do we have a clear statement of what problem(s) we are trying to solve via repackaging? If the problem is that the readers in the intended audience often can't find the information that they are looking for, repackaging may or may not be part of the solution. We should be looking at issues such as whether headings use the terms that readers are looking for, whether the organization of the document is meaningful, whether the index uses terms readers are looking for, and whether more powerful search capabilities would help. If the problem is that the readers in the intended audience often can't find the information that they are looking for, surveys are of limited use in providing the kind of data we would need in order to solve the problem. We'd need to do something more along the lines of card sorting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_sorting). I'll state a few assumptions about audiences just to make sure we're all working from the same set of assumptions: If I recall correctly, we decided some time ago that the intended audience of the DITA specification is developers of DITA tools, not end-users or managers. I think we should have a goal of having the spec, or at least the language reference portion of the spec, be understandable to information architects who have a good grasp of XML. We don't want the spec to be unnecessarily abstruse, but I think we also recognize that no matter how much we improve the writing and organization of the DITA spec, it won't be understandable to non-technical end-users, translators, or managers. People who don't have a pretty deep grasp of what XML is just aren't going to get it. So let's make sure that when we're asking people if they understand the spec, we're only asking the type of people who are technical enough to understand this type of spec. Otherwise the results won't be meaningful. Cheers, Su-Laine Su-Laine Yeo JustSystems Canada, Inc. XMetaL Community Forums: http://forums.xmetal.com For partners only: http://www.justpartnercenter.com
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