Re: [chairs] What can Standards Development / TC Administration do to help?

[James Bryce Clark <jamie.clark@oasis-open.org>]

Thanks.  Hope springs eternal about automation :D  So we need a
critical mass to justify development effort.  Back to Kelvin and the
chairs then ...

1. Do we think that there are a *lot* of TCs who happily author in an
XML editor, and could get together on a schema?

(Let's exclude the case that each TC wants to use its own format, as
too obvious.  Which TCs are using OTHER TCs' work?  Jon mentioned that
UBL uses DocBook.)

2.  Do we think that there are a *lot* of TCs who want only to author
in a  WYSIWYG office-document-style environment only, like Kelvin?
Any reason we could not use a single XML-compatible office document
format for that?  Maybe even a standard?

Regards Jamie

~ James Bryce Clark
~ General Counsel, OASIS
~ http://www.oasis-open.org/who/staff.php#clark

On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 2:44 PM, Mary McRae <mary.mcrae@oasis-open.org> wrote:
> Great point Jamie!
>
> Ken Holman has done an amazing job with the DocBook environment - it's been through several iterations now - and it's almost foolproof. I'm hoping that the DITA environment JoAnn and Don have mentioned will create the same end result - eliminating many of the things that cause problems. It's not just the checking that's quicker, but using the DocBook environment makes it much harder to mess up.
>
> I think the key thing here is that unless a significant percentage of TCs would be taking advantage of it by authoring in a content and structure-based, rather than formatting-based, structured markup language, the development costs can't be justified.
>
> Mary
>