Re: [dita-adoption] Alternative for DITA Help Technologies Guide

[Don Day <dond@us.ibm.com>]

This is an interesting idea, Marc. The immediate impression I had was that
the guide might take the form of an heuristic exploration of needs in which
new data can be added without having to revise the entire work. One example
path might be:

[start] You need to publish DITA content: (select Web, print, etc.)

[print] You need a printable output: (select RTF, PDF, PostScript,
FrameMaker; add others as they are made known)

[PDF] Your output needs to be style controlled: (select XSL-FO, CSS)

[CSS] list available CSS-driven formatters

Necessarily, some paths might end up with no solution yet known, which is
fine. Someday a CSS-driven RTF output might in fact become available if
visitors to an empty node could leave a comment describing their business
case.

Newly known technologies simply link in at the appropriate choice points.
No comparison is implied--the reader is making their own priority
assessment as they go, and the end node should be a place in which the best
practices for that particular path can be accumulated, ideally via a wiki
page (IMO).

Would this be a feasible and interesting approach to your suggestion?

Regards,
--
Don Day
Chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
Architect, Lightweight DITA Publishing Solutions
Email: dond@us.ibm.com
11501 Burnet Rd. MS9033E015, Austin TX 78758
Phone: +1 512-244-2868 (home office)

"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
 Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"
   --T.S. Eliot


                                                                                                          
  From:       mspeyer@stilo.com                                                                           
                                                                                                          
  To:         dita-adoption@lists.oasis-open.org                                                          
                                                                                                          
  Date:       04/01/2009 09:37 AM                                                                         
                                                                                                          
  Subject:    [dita-adoption] Alternative for DITA Help Technologies Guide                                
                                                                                                          





Hi All,

Since I am quite new to the OASIS contributor process as a member forgive
me if in this not the right way to provide my view on some of the past
discussions.

The final word on the DITA Help Technologies Guide has gone out and the
focus of this group is now on a Beginners Guide for Getting Output from
DITA (JoAnns favorite title). I think this is very good and a very much
needed.

The problem with a guide that tries to evaluate tools is that it may never
get it right, quickly becomes outdated or unintentionally favors certain
vendors. Such a guide also postulates the view of the persons who have done
the evaluation: what requirements did they use and how where they
prioritized? Whatever the answer is, it is probably different from a DITA
adopter. We have all seen these tool comparisons in the back of a book and
I have found them mostly of limited value. In all I think dropping the DITA
Help Technologies Guide was the right decision.

On the other hand we could be missing something by not providing any help
to DITA adopters on technologies and tools.  After all isnt it the
available tools - both commercial and open source  that determines whether
a standards becomes widely accepted and used? Isnt it is the broad tool
support that make organizations decide to go ahead with a proprietary or
open standard? So without any help from the Adoption TC we leave it to the
DITA adopters to make the right choice which is unlikely without a good
background in DITA, XML and previous experience with tools. As a safeguard
some organizations devise an evaluation process, often using poor selection
criteria and loaded with a lot of political burdens. In this case it is
advisable to get a consultant in to help steer the organization through the
difficult tools selection process. Once the decisions have been made and
the tools have been acquired the integration starts, a risky undertaking
especially with the maturity of DITA today. If I was about to adopt DITA I
would feel very uncomfortable especially if I was an SME with limited
budget.

Probably a safer way we can help DITA adopters is by providing a list of
important selection criteria which they can use as a guidance for finding
out what is important and what to look for in tools. Selection criteria can
be objectively constructed. A criterion could have as a short label, a
longer description, why it is important and what level of support to look
for if you want to achieve certain goals. To give an example: in a recent
project with a customer it was realized that the decision to standardize on
MathML for equations has an impact on the authoring tool, the storage
solution and the publishing engine. Unfortunately neither the authoring
tool nor the PDF rendering engine have support for MathML. Sure there are
plug-ins (from the DITA Yahoo Users Group) that render MathML into SVG but
with the DITA-OT on every authors desktop the organization is now facing
increased support. If this organization knew when to use MathML and what
level of tool support is needed for it, they would probably have chosen
other tools.  I also think in addition to the selection criteria we could
also to provide some test DITA content of different levels of complexity
which DITA adopters could use to benchmark their own situation and the
tools they require.

Although it could take quite some work to develop a selection criteria
toolset I think it addresses many of the issues that were identified when
we discussed the DITA Help Technologies Guide.

Best regards,

Marc Speyer
Stilo International plc