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Subject: DITA Technical Committee Meeting Minutes: 11 January 2011 (amended)



DITA Technical Committee Meeting Minutes: 11 January 2011
 
Chaired by Don Day <donday@bga.com>
Minutes recorded by Bruce Nevin <bnevin@cisco.com>
 
The DITA Technical Committee met on Tuesday, 11 January 2011 at 08:00am PT for 18 minutes.
8:00-8:05 Roll call

  o Regrets: Richard Hamilton, Kris Eberlein (depending on power), Deb Bissantz, JoAnn Hackos, Keith Schengili-Roberts, Doug Morrison
  o Quorum was established.

STANDING BUSINESS:

Approve minutes from previous business meeting:
  o http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201012/msg00104.html (Nevin)
  o Acceptance moved by Don, seconded by Elliot, carried by acclamation.

ACTION (Bruce): communicate to TechComm SC that their report is due January 18.

Subcommittee/liaison reports: none today

Ensuing:

  o OASIS DITA Technical Communication Subcommittee (18 January 2011 if confirmed)
  o OASIS DITA for Enterprise Business Documents Subcommittee (25 January 2011)
  o OASIS DITA Pharmaceutical Content Subcommittee

BUSINESS:

1. New ITEM: Contradiction in DITA spec for <msgblock> and <msgph> (dita-users report)

  o http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201012/msg00105.html
  o Matter of best practice advice, esp. given presence of available msgRef specialization. Transfer to DITA Adoption TC?

Don: This seems an opportunity to provide additional guidance to adopters. Chris: experimentally determined that <msgph> in fact cannot be a child of <msgblock>. This is a problem in the spec, not an adoption issue. Michael: we should permit this in DITA 1.3. There's no backward compatibility issue if we decide to allow <msgph> in addition. 

This is probably because <ph> was removed, we don't recall the (pre-OASIS) reason for that. We should note in errata that the text is wrong in 1.2, and that we're considering inclusion in 1.3.

ACTION (Robert): Add this to errata. (done)

ACTION (Robert): Add this to the 1.3 list.

Is there a best practices issue? Michael: maybe not, but we need to update the dita-users list. 

ACTION (Don): Inform dita-users of this erratum.

CLOSED (pending completion of actions).

2. New ITEM: microXML and the future of DITA

  o http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201101/msg00004.html (Day)

Is this an issue that we need to track here? Discussion indicates that although this is not an 'official' issue, there is potential concern. Web 2.0 Workgroup interested in watching it. If applications supporting uXML are primarily oriented to HTML-5, will they preclude DITA? The TC will leave this issue for the DITA for the web SC to monitor.

[The following discussion occurred under item 3 below but belongs here.]

Michael: uXML is proposal for a subset of the XML standard that browsers would support for 'polyglot' pages (HTML and islands of XML). Our interest is to ensure that DITA features are not dependent on aspects of XML that are excluded from that subset. We know what the dependencies are. We have no dependencies on DTD, XSD, or entities. Changes to namespaces could affect DITA when we are namespace enabled. Don: Could either break <conref>, or we could use <conref> e.g. to reference HTML-5 content, if it gets XML built into HTML-5. Michael: he's not looking at enriching HTML-5 with XML, he's looking at what can be eliminated from XML. He's proposing just prefixes rather than full namespaces if the prefix can be complex and include periods. We might want to try to accommodate this through some kind of inheritance, e.g. topic.reference.api:apiref.  Chris: is this discussion premature? No standards body has taken this up, no market share. Don: Some of the players (e.g. Michael Kay) can have strong influence with potential impact on DITA. Elliot: It's hard to see how any decisions on XML syntax could have any effect on DITA. Michael: generally agree, but would you be willing to read through and confirm? Would like to be sure that James Clark agrees. For namespaces, he may actually have some good ideas that we could borrow. Don: Could lower adoption barriers by moving XML support out to browsers. Elliot: there may be use cases for doing things in the browser that I haven't considered reasonable in the past.

ACTION (Elliot): review to confirm that James is not doing anything that is unworkable.

ACTION (Dita for the Web SC): monitor this.

3. New ITEM: Ruminations on the structure of the DITA Standard

  o http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201101/msg00009.html (Nitchie)

Consideration for DITA 2.0. Might make the uXML issue more manageable. [Ensuing discussion and action assignments recorded under item 2 above.]

4. New ITEM: wiki.oasis-open.org pages in search results

  o http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201101/msg00010.html (Yeo)

  o Discuss any further recommendations; Chairs to forward requests to Robin Cover

Michael: We don't want to put up barriers to search, openness is a critical value. We might reduce its ranking. Alternative: put a link at the top of such pages pointing to the latest info. Don: this would raise the google search rank. Su-Laine: But you're right, clearer labeling is needed on these pages. 

Rather than push old items down, we can pull official pages up in prominence, e.g. by adding links. Don: this is a problem for other standards in OASIS. 

ACTION (Don, Kris): Forward discussion to Robin Cover for OASIS recommendation.

5. Continuing ITEM: Perceptions of DITA complexity

  o http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201012/msg00070.html (latest post on thread, Priestley)
  o http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201101/msg00003.html (reminder from Robert Anderson)
  o DITA Perceptions (Managing Complexity)

Robert: we can only come up with valid solutions if we understand where these perceptions of complexity are coming from. Stan: strongly agree. Haven't yet entered comments gathered. Robert: still need to gather user comments so we can analyze them. Focus for now should be on the causes and not discuss solutions yet.

ACTION (All): Gather adopters' comments about complexity of DITA and identify causes of those perceptions on the wiki at http://wiki.oasis-open.org/dita/DITA_Perceptions.

Housekeeping

The IBM meeting passcode has expired. This is an opportunity for another company to offer to host the TC's conference calls. IBM has been hosting since the beginning. We will discuss this further; for the immediate term we will set up a new number for the call.

ACTION (Robert): find a new number

ACTION (Don): issue new meeting invitation

8:50-8:55 Announcements/Opens
8:55 Adjourn



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