Peter,
On 4/23/2010 1:51 PM, Peter F Brown (Pensive) wrote:
CCFAAA135DF6554F92BACD35A80653D705DDF36602@IE2RD2XVS031.red002.local"
type="cite">
I
remember when many said that xml would solve all our semantic
woes, with “self-describing documents”.
Hey! No reason to bring up old hurts. ;-)
CCFAAA135DF6554F92BACD35A80653D705DDF36602@IE2RD2XVS031.red002.local"
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The
problem is not the toolkit – it is using and
conforming to the spec. blueprints.
-
If
a spec is drafted in ODF or Word, how difficult is it to
assess whether the required sections are present? Some minimal tooling
should
be able to do this, whatever tool/schema is used;
-
If
there is a QA and subjective assessment to be made of the
actual content/wording, no amount of tooling will address the problem
+1 on the problem being conformance to spec. blueprints.
And thanks for pointing out that this isn't exclusively a tooling
problem.
Tooling can address link checking, validation of the structure of
content (like the conformance section being the last section before any
annexes), uniform styling, etc.
It should not be difficult to assess whether required sections are
available or not. I don't know how much detail you want in this thread
so I will leave it at that but with the observation that several
approaches are possible based on work done at OASIS.
For the non-tooling aspects, OASIS needs to decide if substantive
quality is a goal for its standards. It is as simple as that.
Standards can be made quickly, cheaply or well. But you only get to
pick one of those. Standards that are made well are not quick, nor are
they cheap.
Personally I am hopeful that OASIS will choose the route of making
standards well. There are a number of examples of well made standards
at OASIS. All I am asking is that we hold all TCs to the same bar.
Hope you are at the start of a great week!
Patrick
CCFAAA135DF6554F92BACD35A80653D705DDF36602@IE2RD2XVS031.red002.local"
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Peter
+1
to a cloud-based editing solution that supports
both browser-based editing (for lightweight interactions) and rich
clients for
deeper interaction.
It would make enforcing OASIS formatting rules, metadata requirements,
etc.
much easier. And it would be much easier to transition when those rules
evolve.
I also agree with Michael that it should not be a requirement that all
browsers
be supported, just enough options so that their is a reasonable set of
choices
across platforms.
"Spec as app". It's a refreshing new way of looking at it.
=Drummond
Co-Chair, OASIS XRI & XDI Technical Committees
On Fri, Apr 23, 2010
at 8:59 AM,
Michael Priestley <mpriestl@ca.ibm.com>
wrote:
Are
there
platforms on which neither browser is available?
I'm
not sure
if/when the editor will become available on other platforms, but it
seems to me
like requiring installation of a specific browser is a lower bar than
requiring
installation of a custom toolchain. I have to have both installed
myself just
to deal with the requirements of different web conferencing software.
Hi Michael,
For starters it appears that the only browsers supported are IE and
Firefox.
Mary
On Apr 23, 2010, at 11:33 AM, Michael Priestley wrote:
If OASIS provided a web/hosted solution for authoring specifications
and
producing various outputs, would that solve the problem of custom
tooling?
Would that be of interest beyond just the DITA TC?
Normal users would edit the content directly, or edit in a word
processor and
then copy/paste into the editor. The editor would enforce common
structural
requirements and prevent inconsistent formatting. Expert users could
take the
content offline and work in the XML editor of their choice.
That would give us the strengths of an XML tool chain for managing
reuse,
creating multiple formats, providing structural and presentational
consistency.
But without the weaknesses of an XML tool chain in requiring expert
authors,
custom tool installations, or extensive training.
The question is not meant to be hypothetical - the technology exists
today and
is being used in similar scenarios. But we can't use it with OASIS
unless they
host it - otherwise we'd be storing and working with content outside of
OASIS,
which would break the rules. I'm willing to investigate whether we
could work
with OASIS to make this available for spec development, if there's
broad enough
interest.
For a sense of the editing interface, you can take a look at an editor
vendor's
demo here:
http://xopus.com/demo/dita
This is preliminary support, so it's slow to load a topic the first
time you
open one with a specific type. You can add elements using the [+]
dropdown.
Michael Priestley, Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM)
Lead IBM DITA Architect
mpriestl@ca.ibm.com
http://dita.xml.org/blog/25
--
Patrick Durusau
patrick@durusau.net
Chair, V1 - US TAG to JTC 1/SC 34
Convener, JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3 (Topic Maps)
Editor, OpenDocument Format TC (OASIS), Project Editor ISO/IEC 26300
Co-Editor, ISO/IEC 13250-1, 13250-5 (Topic Maps)
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