Groups - DITA TC Meeting Minutes 5 September 2017 uploaded

[Nancy Harrison<nharrison@infobridge-solutions.com>]

        Submitter's message
        ActionItems:
1.  Bob will make sure that OASIS cover pages can be appropriately generated when CN is at working draft stage.
2.  Kris will make Errata 02 change related to her email of 2 Sept. wrt "Grammar issue with 2.5.3.1: Overview of specialization"
3.  Kris will make Errata 02 change related to her email of 30 Aug. wrt "Run on words in subjectHead shortdesc"
4.  Kris will make Errata 02 change related to her mail of 30 Aug. wrt "Grammar glitch in

"
5. Kris will make Errata 02 change related to Dawn's mail of 5 Sept. wrt "Mistake in example within 'created' element."


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Minutes of the OASIS DITA TC
Tuesday, 5 September 2017
Recorded by Nancy Harrison
link to agenda for this meeting:
https://wiki.OASIS-open.org/dita/PreviousAgendas


Attendance: not reported



Business
========
1. Roll call
Regrets: Stan Doherty


2. Approve minutes from previous business meeting:
https://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/dita/download.php/61505/minutes20170829.txt (Nancy Harrison, 05 September 2017)
moved by Kris, 2nded by Alan, approved by TC


3. Announcements:
New TC members: None


4. Action items
6 September 2016
Kris: Revise subject scheme example topic pulled from errata 01
4 October 2016:
Tom: Work on aggregated minutes for 2005-2011 (IN PROGRESS)
25 July 2017
Tech comm subcommittee: Consider whether to make proposal to allow steps to nest a stage 1 proposal
[on agenda today]
8 August 2017
Kris: Request GitHub repo for L & T subcommittee (waiting on info from subcommittee)
Kris, Nancy, Stan, Tom: Test new PDF style sheets (COMPLETED by Kris and Stan)
15 August 2017:
LwDITA subcommittee:
Develop schedule for committee note (IN PROGRESS)
Carlos; no mtg yesterday, so no chance for SC to do this, I will try to do it over email so as to have CN out asap.
Kris; you can put out a schedule, you don't have to have a mtg to approve it.
22 August 2017:
Bob: Add Kris and Robert to list of committers for TechComm SC GitHub repo (COMPLETED)
Carlos: Add Kris and Robert to list of committers for LwDITA SC GitHub repo (COMPLETED)


5. Specification style sheets
Results from testing?
Nancy; having build problems; in contact with Bob
Tom; I haven't gotten far enough to run into those yet, please let me know about them when they're fixed.
Kris; some trouble with cover page, before we even get to csprd draft, we're doing working drafts; please make sure the draft status is right.
I'd like to send our cover sheets to Paul well ahead of doing the release.
Bob; given complexity of their format, that's a good idea...
***ActionItem; Bob will make sure that OASIS cover pages can be appropriately generated when CN is at working draft stage.


6. E-mail on dita-comment list
None


7. Delayed conref domain
https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201708/msg00056.html (Eberlein, 29 August 2017)
https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201709/msg00005.html (Anderson, 05 September 2017)
- Kris; is this something we want to consider removing for 2.0, since it's not used outside of IBM.
- Robert; thinking about it as well; ;did a poll at IBM to see if anyone is using it, no response. Most responders haven't even heard of it, even though the feature came out of IBM. Came out of Eclipse
- Kris; Michael posted to list,
- Robert; he's making the same point; it's designed to be platform-neutral, but it was designed around eclipse, and doesn't seem to work for anything else.
- Kris; what do folks think?
- Eliot; any new feature like this would have to be really justified.
- Robert; this went into DITA 1.2 when there was no real review. Its gen'l purpose was to resolve most conrefs, except for some that would be dynamic.
- Tom; I did theoretically know this existed, but it's in a broad category of 'things that I never had any idea what it does'. Whenever a customer asks me about it, I say 'I don't know.'
[there were no objections to removing it, in line with our goal for 2.0 of simplifying the spec.]
- Chris; I also have questions about its suitability as an authoring concern, even in dynamic delivery situations; the system would be making decisions, not an author.
- Robert; it's difficult to use, that's one of the problems with the design. Idea was originally that with an open standard, we had to specify stuff, otherwise people would implement it in non-standard ways.
- Kris; any reservations? Let's think about it and make a decision next week.
- Robert; we'll have to go thru the spec to see what relates to this.
- Nancy; are the spec changes just removing stuff?
- Kris; includes removing archref and langref topics, and any collateral info. Do we have a volunteer to own this proposal?
- Alan; I can do it.
- Robert will make a card for it, with Alan as owner.


8. DITA 1.3 Errata 02
Wiki page for DITA 1.3 Errata 02
New items:
Grammar issue with 2.5.3.1 Overview of specialization
https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201709/msg00000.html (Eberlein, 2 September 2017)
- Kris; can we make that change?
[TC approved the change]
***ActionItem; Kris will make Errata 02 change related to her email of 2 Sept. wrt "Grammar issue with 2.5.3.1: Overview of specialization"
Run on words in subjectHead shortdesc
https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201708/msg00057.html (Eberlein, 30 August 2017)
***ActionItem; Kris will make Errata 02 change related to her email of 30 Aug. wrt "Run on words in subjectHead shortdesc"
Grammar glitch in
https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201708/msg00058.html (Eberlein, 30 August 2017)
Responses by Eliot Kimber and Tom Magliery
(Final phrasing suggestion) https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201708/msg00066.html (Eberlein, 31 August 2017)
[final suggestion was approved by tom and eliot]
***ActionItem; Kris will make Errata 02 change related to her mail of 30 Aug. wrt "Grammar glitch in "
- Kris; Wrt required-cleanup element, should we remove it for 2.0?
- Robert; I don't know, don't really have an opinion on it.
- Bob; I'd like to keep it for programmatic conversions to DITA.
- Eliot; aespecially now that we're clarifying the language to make it more useful...
- Kris; I wonder how many folks doing conversions actually use this
- Bob; I use it when I run into a problem I can't sort out. Other conversion vendors (e.g. DCL) use it as well.
- Robert; IBM's original conversion tools used it.
[consensus was to keep required-cleanup in for 2.0]
Mistake in example within 'created' element https://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/dita/email/archives/201709/msg00007.html (Stevens, 5 September 2017)
- Dawn; there's an error in the example for the 'created' element; it shows an instance of the 'revised' element without the required @modified. We need to add @modified to the example.
***ActionItem; Kris will make Errata 02 change related to Dawn's mail of 5 Sept. wrt "Mistake in example within 'created' element."


9. DITA 2.0 stage one proposals: Discussion
Allow steps to nest (Robert Anderson)
https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201707/msg00037.html (Anderson, 20 July 2017)
- Robert; I asked around IBM about things folks want for 2.0; a bunch of folks wanted nesting steps instead of substeps. The original idea, around substeps vs allowing steps to nest, was to enforce best practices, but it's not only inefficient, it doesn't work.
- Bob; I like the idea of allowing steps to nest.
- Dawn; but the problem is 'how many people are using substeps?', and how much trouble will there be in migration?
- Robert; it's an easily automated migration.
- Kris; for someone in a CCMS, it's not as easy to migrate.
- Robert; and that's why I had the caveat; if we're already doing stuff that requires migration, this isn't much extra work; if we aren't doing anything else, this would be a pain.
- Eliot; I don't think we can let failures of CMS design limit our 2.0 design.
- Kris; I'm not saying we should do it, just raising the issue.
- Eliot; we've already identified things that will require content migration; e.g. doctype changes, so it will already be necessary. Given how long it's taken for vendors to adopt 1.3, we can expect that it will take at least as long to adopt 2.0.
- Kris; going back to the specific issue, does anyone have problems with the idea?
- Eliot; so if I did want to restrict the number of levels, I'd have to do some doctype revision.
- Robert; when I got involved with DITA, it was presented as 'this is a best practice' and I just accepted it. I was surprised to hear about it from IBM.
- Kris; do we want to consider keeping substeps?
- Tom; we don't like dual models even for footnotes, an we want to simplify
- Robert; we've had trouble with having a general and strict task; do we want to have just one of those as well?
- Chris; one thing that applies is the idea of having some transitional doctype shells, to enable migration to 2.0. In our phase 3 proposals, I'd like to see recommendations for what will be in transitional shells.
- -Tom; the risk is that customers will start to use them. Will other vendors be doing this?
- Chris; we've never released a backwards incomcpatible release before, so it's never come up... The transitional doctypes would be for keeping old docs, the recommendation would be to use new doctypes for new docs.
- Bob; this presumes that a system won't be able to interoperate with 1.3 at 2.0
- Robert; I think people would stay in 2.0; the real crunch would come in 2.1, when the transitional doctypes wouldn't work.
- Eliot; thru specialization, any org could make their own transitional shells, so it suggests to me that we should do it, even if we don't do it as part of the official specialization. OTOH, that doesn't avoid the dangers of folks using transitional shells and not really migrating...
- Chris; if we don't have a 'shallow' migration path, migration will be hindered.
- Eliot; that will happen regardless.
- Kris; for moving to 1.3, new content is done in 1.3, but old content stays in 1.2; old stuff is retrofitted only if there's a need for 1.3 features.
- Eliot; i think it will depend on tools implementation; editing tools won't have a problem, but CCMS vendors will be even more resistant that they have been for 1.3.
- Kris; my concern is that an extra set of doc shells will just be really confusing, and require a lot of work and a lot of explanation and maintenance from us.
- Nancy; I'd see it as a thing for the Adoption TC to make a recommendation on.
- Robert; I think we might just as well do it as make recommendations about it.
- Kris; and there's not the expertise on the adoption tc to do it.
- Chris; I think I was contemplating a re-design of the way metadata is designed. I was thinking of fairly drastic ways to normalize designs, but that would break everything...
- Kris; I'm not sure I understand what would be the beneift of transitional shells
- Chris; if there are new features that would be of use to large orgs, they could use them.
- Robert; it lets you do a progressive migration, just partial...
- Kris; do we have any gen'l sense of where the community is wrt 1.3 adoption?
- Keith; total number of migrations to 1.3 were low; many orgs are still working with 1.2. The total number is still fairly small; we want to ask about that at the virtual listening session later this monoth.
- Kris; as we're considering contents of 2.0, would it be helpful to have an opportunity to talk to vendors, and hear from them about their concerns about future of dita development?
- Robert; that is a very important thing.
- Keith; I've been reporting back to Ixiasoft, based on the listening sessions; 2.0 is being seen as being very far off, vs. LwD and multimedia domain.
- Kris; it would be good to have a discussion that included LwD and the multimedia domain, as well as 2.0.
- Keith; it's a bit strange to work with orgs that aren't OASIS members.
- Robert; going out to talk to vendors won't give them the ability to puch specific changes, but we need to know whether, if 2.0 isn't backwards compatible, you'll just ignore it.
[continued to next week]



12 noon ET close

-- Ms. Nancy Harrison

Document Name: DITA TC Meeting Minutes 5 September 2017

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Submitter: Ms. Nancy Harrison
Group: OASIS Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) TC
Folder: Meeting Notes
Date submitted: 2017-09-11 23:05:52