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Subject: Groups - DITA TC Meeting Minutes 29 November 2016 uploaded
- From: Nancy Harrison<nharrison@infobridge-solutions.com>
- To: dita@lists.oasis-open.org
- Date: Sun, 4 Dec 2016 23:27:32 -0800 (PST)
Submitter's message
***ActionItem: all TC members, please read Leigh's 'iceberg' presntation
=================================================
Minutes of the OASIS DITA TC
Tuesday, 29 November 2016
Recorded by Nancy Harrison
link to agenda for this meeting:
https://wiki.OASIS-open.org/dita/PreviousAgendas
Business
========
1. Roll call
Regrets: Stan Doherty, Joe Storbeck
2. Approve minutes from previous business meeting:
https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201611/msg00017.html (Nancy Harrison, 1 November 2016)
https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201611/msg00019.html (Nancy Harrison, 8 November 2016)
moved by Kris, seconded by Dick, approved by TC
3. Announcements:
New DITA TC members: None
4. Report back from German conferences and events
a. tcworld 2016 (Kris, Eliot, Keith)
- Keith; got a much more open reception this year from German companies, just a very light mention of 'DITA Taliban'. At Ixiasoft booth, got a much better reception from clients and questioners; not completely 'cordial', but much less 'frosty' compared to last year.
- Kris; background; in 2015, German vendors were 'circling the wagons'; one actually used the term 'DITA Taliban' in a presentation. The big shift was that a very active working group (related to Industry 4.0) has been working on standard IIDR (Intelligent Information Delivery & Retrieval) Unlike realm of DITA content delivery platforms, in German there's been up to now a lock on the portal you choose. New IIDR efforts are aimed at breaking that lock.
- Eliot; nothing particularly to add; but not the open hostility I felt last year. DITA presentations were fairly well-attended
- Kris; Sarah O'Keefe & I organized a DITA Track Forum, all in the same room on same day; we might have been preaching to the choir. There was also a presentation [in German] on moving the L&T website in German, and we did a panel on DITA interoperability. I've also completed translating slides that the TEKOM 4.0 working group gave, but I'm not ready to provide it yet.
- Keith; will Ulrika (Parson AG) join OASIS?
- Mark; is Parson AG using DITA?
- Kris; RDS (?) will be a standard thru TEKOM, though they might also be looking at becoming a standard through ISO. Should we try to get a presentation on their IIRD work sometime in the new year?
- Keith; good idea.
- Kris; Ulrika probably wouldn't be the rep; it's her company; she has technical staff she would probably tap to be the TC rep.
b. DITA-OT Day 2016 Kris, Eliot, Robert
- Robert; there were about 80 people, not sure what focus to take in giving an overview; though I thought it went pretty well. Number of attendees was comparable with previous years; presentations were very technical, There was also a talk by SAP, which was a nice mix of 'what people are doing, how to get more out of it.
- MarkG; I liked most of the presentations, and the SAP presentation was amazing, They have 700 writers in the system; many customizations, a nice variety of things; there was also a good presentation on terminology.
- Kris; yesh, that's about an add-on for work within Oxygen for creating a terminology database; and I gave a non-technical presentation, with a focus on 'who uses, and who supports, the Toolkit, and is this feasible in the long run?' I was expecially talking to commercial vendors that use/ship DITA-OT; the DITA-OT web page now has a lengthy list of them.
- Robert; your talk opened a lot of people's eyes, wrt how few people are working on this, and how many vendors are making a lot of revenue from it.
- Mark; enlightening and sobering...
- Keith; Kris, do you have any action items from that?
- Kris; I proposed a number of things, mostly in realm of investigatory efforts; look at the PDF; it's not really germane to the work of TC, just for the toolkit project. In my session at DITA Europe, I made the same suggestions.
- Mark; there are a lot of vendors who support the TC; they're just not supporting directly DITA-OT; what's the rationale?
- Kris; you mean, what vendors actively support the TC? that's what I talked about at DITA Europe...
c. DITA Europe 2016 Kris, Eliot, Robert, Dawn
- Robert; I gave the first session, which was a presentation version of the 'DITA vs. DITA-OT' paper; it went over well. But even with that presentation, I also talked to people, before and after, who were confused between the two.
- Eliot; it was at least as well-attended as last year; the basic theme was 'dynamic delivery of DITA', integrating non-DITA data sources, interesting, seemed like a nice conference but nothing earth-shattering.
- Dawn; I agree; it was good but not earth-shattering, There were a lot of discussions on Leigh's 'iceberg' presentation, it generated the most traffic and the most comments.
- Kris; I did my usual DITA past/present/future overview; I talked about LwD and 2.0. There was enthusiasm but also some odd requests (e.g., CALS tables, from someone who doesn't currently use DITA but heading in that direction). I finished of with my concerns about keeping the TC healthy; we have a much more active group participating, but there are holes in some of our technical coverage, and there are only a handful of companies/vendors represented. There are companies that are TC members, but have no active involvement. I was trying to do some guilt-tripping of companies that make money off DITA, but don't participate or join OASIS.
5. "The DITA iceberg" presentation at DITA Europe 2016"
https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201611/msg00036.html (Eberlein, 16 November 2016)
https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201611/msg00038.html (Magliery, 16 November 2016)
https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201611/msg00039.html (Priestley, 16 November 2016)
https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201611/msg00041.html (Eberlein, 17 November 2016)
https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201611/msg00045.html (Anderson, 17 November 2016)
https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201611/msg00046.html (Magliery, 17 November 2016)
https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201611/msg00050.html (Eberlein, 18 November 2016)
https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201611/msg00046.html (Rob Hanna, 17 November 2016)
https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201611/msg00048.html (Bob Thomas, 17 November 2016)
https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201611/msg00049.html (Don Day, 17 November 2016)
https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201611/msg00051.html (Eberlein, 18 November 2016)
https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201611/msg00056.html (Eberlein, 18 November 2016)
- Robert; Leigh makes a lot of assumptions about what is useful and what is not, even though other people have different ideas about those features that she dislikes. Part of her list of 'extra' stuff added in later releases reflects the fact that by the time wew were working on 1.3 (and even part of 1.2), there wasn't a lot that we could add that would be critical for everyone. The basic stuff was in 1.0 and 1.1, so 1.3 added new features, not basic features. It's twisting the numbers to say; 'TC was wasting time on features I don't like.'
- Eliot; I feel the same way; all my clients needed key scopes because they need x-deliverable linking. It seems odd for Leigh, at ixiasoft, to say it's not useful when her own clients need/use it.
- Robert; and using keyscopes is copmplex, but if you don't need it, you can completely ignore it; it's just a single attribute, so it doesn't present any complexity to end users except for those who need it. And some of the complexity is in dealing with edge cases, but we're a legal standard, and have to focus on the edge cases.
- Eliot; another thing I noticed in the presentation is blaming the messenger for a problem that's inherent in doing sophisticated information delivery with limited resources; a mismatch in expectation between what needs to be done to solve a problem, and the lack of resources addressed to the problem.
- Robert; One of the points that drove her perspective, I think, is that it's incredibly hard to use constraints; I think she was thinking 'if this [constraints] is so hard, why didn't they work on that instead?'
- Kris; and we as a TC made a mistake with constraints; it didn't get enough thought (and it's designer Erik left the TC), and we oversold the hell out of them. It's a straightforward algorithm, but it's incredibly hard and ridiculously time-consuming to implement; people think 'there's too much there' and it's not easy enough to get what I want'.
- Kris; Leigh's presentation angered me, but a large part of the community has trouble getting what they want; they can't constrain, mostly because most people have no clue about creating doc shells. 2.0 is an opportunity to revisit our OOTB shells, and also re-frame them, or publicize a tool to build them, like Jarno's.
- Eliot; to some degree, this is a tools problem; we need a tool to create user's own shells with basic constraints, but there isn't one. And some tools make it very difficult to use local shells.
- Kris; it's easy in Oxygen
- Tom; it's easy in XMetal
- Eliot; it's basically impossible in Framemaker; you can do it, but I have never done it.
- Kris; and many folks are in a system where their tools are integrated with their CCMS, which makes it even harder.
- Mark; it's a training wheels approach, maybe we should make available a bunch of different lightweight shells so people can choose...
- Eliot; we can do that, but we end up with one shell for evey combination of modules, so we end up with too many choices and it become hard again to choose.
- Mark; too many choices, they'd need guidelines to use them.
- Kris; well, with LwD, we're providing people with more options; for 2.0, should we consider having more than one set of shells? (I'd have real reservations...) For other options, maybe there could be someone outside the TC who develops and maintains starter shells; but if we're looking at the real utility of shells, they really need to be shipped with products and with DITA-OT.
***ActionItem: all TC members, please read Leigh's 'iceberg' presntation
- Robert; we've focused on what bothered us in the presentation, but the complexity thing had some good points. In particular, it brought up modularity discussions; I'm hopeful we can make it easier in 2.0 to help people get what they want.
- Kris; Robert's proposal was to do constraints and specializations in RNG and have good tools to generate monolithic DTDs.
- Mark; that's what we're already doing with the LwD specialization tool.
- Robert; so we'd get rid of modularity in DTD/XSD?
- Eliot; we can do it for DTD but not XSD; we should simply abandon XSD; because of constraints on XSD's #redefine module, it's simply impossible to have modular XSD
- Robert; no, I'm not suggesting XSD modules, just monolithic XSD.
- Scott; in the DocBook TC, we're talking about abandoning XSD altogether, making it no longer a supported work product.
- Eric; creating just a generated XSD, not modular, will work for us.(Ixiasoft); we do need something, since some clients still use it.
Other Business:
Scott; thanks to everyone from DocBook TC for helping get votes to ratify new release.
11:59 AM ET close
-- Ms. Nancy Harrison
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