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Subject: Re: [chairs] Re: Publication templates


Just to set the record straight - no 'change of minds' happened w/r/t formatting. The DITA TC chose to do something different for the HTML output and this required some back and forth to ensure that the spec could be easily navigated and that duplicate content was clearly identified.

Best regards,

Mary 




On Dec 14, 2010, at 7:22 AM, Gershon Joseph (gerjosep) wrote:

> The problem is that, while developing the standards track template to support authoring standards in DITA, there was no specification for the PDF or HTML outputs. We had to reverse-engineer from Word, and then, on the fly, the OASIS administration changed their minds about the formatting, so we were chasing a moving target. Having a clear specification will prevent this willy-nilly changing of the OASIS look and feel that cost one of our members a fortune because they were kind enough to donate a stylesheet developer to the project, and he had to redo his work several times. Add to this the new non-standards track documents, with different headers and footers, notices, and title pages for the public review and post-public review publications, and the number of variations we need to code for increases exponentially. The OASIS administration cannot change the look and feel without formally specifying what those changes are. Also, they should be bound by not being allowed to make changes whenever they feel like it, but instead any OASIS template specification should remain unchanged for (in my opinion) at least six months in order to provide some stability to the authoring environments.
> 
> If there was an official OASIS XML based authoring environment for OASIS artifacts, I doubt the DocBook or DITA TCs would object to using it. What we are objecting to is the current state of affairs, where there is no formal specification for OASIS artifacts, and OASIS administration only supports unstructured formats -- for an XML standards body, authoring our standards in non-XML formats should not even pass the "red face in the mirror" test!
> 
> Cheers,
> Gershon
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jon Bosak [mailto:bosak@pinax.com] 
> Sent: Tuesday, December 14, 2010 12:47 AM
> 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
> 



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