Recent DITA tool interoperability problem

["Beims Bob" <bob.beims@freescale.com>]

DITA Adoption TC;

We've recently experienced a situation in the DITA TC Semiconductor
Information Design Subcommittee (SIDSC) that I wanted to pass along to
you. It represents a scenario that mitigates against easy adoption of
DITA, and thus presents an opportunity for some sort of best practices
training to avoid it.

Here's the scenario:

1.	
	I created a template for meeting minutes, using the Syntext
Serna editor and posted it to the SC documents repository (see
http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/dita-sidsc/document.php?doc
ument_id=28347). I used the base information type of "topic" for the
template.
2.	
	The template was downloaded by one of the SC members so that she
could use FrameMaker 8 to capture minutes from a teleconference.
3.	
	FrameMaker 8 told her that the file is not valid.
4.	
	When this issue was raised during the next SC teleconference, I
downloaded the file and opened it with oXygen 9.3 to check it, and was
told by that editor that the file is valid.
5.	
	As I was doing that, another member of the SC fiddled with the
file using some other editor, and found that by removing the
<related-links> stuff, the file would open in FrameMaker 7.2.

Hmmm... this scenario says that interoperability via an open standard
may not be as easy as we'd hoped. Here we've got four different
DITA-compliant editors that disagree on the validity of a DITA file.
 
Your thoughts?

Respectfully,
Bob Beims

Chair, OASIS DITA TC SIDSC

Applications Engineer, Staff Principal
Microcontroller Solutions Group
Freescale Semiconductor, Inc.

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