RE: [chairs] Re: Publication templates

["Kristen Eberlein" <keberlein@sdl.com>]

Jon, it's hard to write XSL transformations if you don't know what the requirements are :)

Why should multiple TCs go through the work of reverse engineering a Word or OpenOffice template?

I'm not raising *any* points about the look-and-feel of the prescribed styles; I just want clear specifications that volunteers on my TCs can code to.

Best regards,

Kris
Secretary, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
Charter member, OASIS DITA Adoption Committee

Kristen James Eberlein l DITA Architect and Technical Specialist l SDL Structured Content Technologies Division l (t) + 1 (919) 682-2290 l keberlein@sdl.com
 
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-----Original Message-----
From: Jon Bosak [mailto:bosak@pinax.com] 
Sent: Monday, December 13, 2010 5:47 PM
To: Kristen Eberlein
Cc: Mary McRae; Norman Walsh; members@lists.oasis-open.org; chairs@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [chairs] Re: Publication templates

Kristen Eberlein wrote:
| I find this unacceptable. The Technical Committees *must* have a
| proper specification about OASIS requirements for work artifacts
| available to them.
|
| Providing Microsoft Office and OpenOffice templates for TCs that
| want to use them is nice touch, and I am glad that you and your
| staff are able to do this work.
|
| But those templates *must* conform to an official OASIS document
| -- perhaps even a specification, as Norm suggested -- that
| outlines the conventions (font, page size, headers, footers, etc.)
| that OASIS work artifacts must follow.

Having now published several documents using (at one time or
another) the Word, OpenOffice, and DocBook OASIS document
templates, I'm not understanding the tone of desperation here.  I
didn't find the preassigned paragraph formats or order of
presentation objectionable or difficult to work with.  The visual
style is clunky compared to, say, magazine layouts, but it's
serviceable for technical documentation.  The fact that the
templates hadn't been through the OASIS standardization process
didn't make them any harder to use, or (God wot) less well
designed than if they'd been created by a committee.

The OASIS rules say that the administration gets to make up most
of this.  What's the point in adding an enormous wadge of
procedural machinery on top of it?

What's the problem here?  Is there something in particular you
don't like about the formats?  What exactly is it?

Jon