Groups - DITA Adoption minutes, 6 May 2009 (Adoption_TC_6-May-2009.txt) uploaded

[keberlein@pobox.com]

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      OASIS DITA Adoption Committee Minutes
                Wednesday 6 May 2008
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Minutes recorded by Kristen James Eberlein.


1. ROLL CALL
Regrets: JoAnn Hackos, Brianna Wherry, Mathew Vargese, and Deb Bissantz
Present: Gershon Joseph, Scott Tsao, Su-Laine Yeo, Joe Gelb, Kris Eberlein,
Marc Speyer, Troy Klukewich, Robin Sloan, Sowmya Kannan
Quorum is present.


2. MINUTES FROM PREVIOUS BUSINESS MEETING
*
http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/dita-adoption/event.php?event_id=19926
Motion to approve minutes was seconded by Troy Klukewich. Su-Laine Yeo
voiced an objection and suggested that minutes be amended to read "A vendor
is opposed" rather than "Some vendors oppose".
Motion to approve minutes as amended; seconded by Troy Klukewich; approved
by acclamation.

Action (6 May 2009): Gershon Joseph to amend the minutes for the 22 April
2009 meeting.


3. ACTION ITEMS
Review of open action items skipped, except for the new item about the
facts sheet page (http://wiki.oasis-open.org/dita-adoption/factSheet);
committee members are asked to review and add to the page


4. ITEM: FORMATION OF A TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION SUBCOMMITTEE
Gersho reported that he and JoAnn Hackos are looking to enlist people
outside of the DITA TC or DITA Adoption TC. He is looking for someone at
Cisco: IBM is looking for a new IBM rep. He asks Adoption Committee members
to look to enlist new people, and have interested people contact him. He
also is beginning to write a first draft of subcommittee charter. Kris
Eberlein asked if this might be a good time to post to the dita-users
mailing list.

Action (6 May 2009): Kris Eberlein to post to the dita-users mailing list
and let people know about the move to form a techical communication
subcommittee.


5. ITEM: LINKING IMPROVEMENTS IN DITA 1.2
Gershon asked if Kris Eberlein was ready to discuss her article abou
improvements to linking in DITA 1.2. She replied that she was not and had
not looked at the material since December. This item is to be removed from
the agenda; Kris will notify Gershon and JoAnn when she is ready to have
this be returned to the agenda.


6. ITEM: ITEM: Update DITA Adoption Focus Area Subcommittee
Item should have previously been closed and removed from agenda.


7. ITEM: DITA 1.2 FEATURE ARTICLES
*
http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/dita-adoption/email/archives/200812/msg00015.html
(keyref)
Gershon asked Sowmya Kannen for status on her keyref article. She replied
that she has not yet had time to incorporate the latest comments; it is 90%
completed. Gershon reported the DITA 1.2 panel at CMS/DITA NA was well
received and attended; the keyref feature aroused GREAT interest. JoAnn
asked Gershon to review article and ensure that questions and comments
raised at the panel were addressed. 

Joe Gelb commented that he heard the following concerns from people: 
1) keyref will be hard for vendors to implement in authoring tools and
CMS
2) keyref will require writers to be linked into updated maps. 
Joe is concerned that keyref might be pushing DITA towards a point where it
is too difficult to implement. He asked whether the DITA TC committee had
discussed this issue. 

Gershon reported that he and Elliot Kimber and some vendors had discussed
challenges of implementing keyref after the DITA 1.2 panel; while there
will be challenges, it should be possible to be implemented. The DITA OT
has already implemented keyref successfully, and none of the vendors on the
DITA TC have provided pushback. Conref will not be deprecated. He suggested
that it might be part of Adoption TC's work to understand challenges to
keyref adoption and how to mitigate it.

Joe raised a concern that while an attractive feature, keyref might be so
difficult to implement that DITA will go the way of HyTime.

General sense that we should see whether vendors will be incorporating
support for keyref in their early DITA 1.2 product offerings. 

Gershon also reported that new subcommittees for pharmaceuticals and
mashups are in the making; contact Gershon to get put in contact with
people leading this effort.

Actions (6 May 2009):
1) Sowmya to update her article and sent out e-mail summarizing the open
issues that she addressed.
2) Kris Eberlein, Gershon Joseph, and JoAnn Hackos to review article with
eye to questions raised at conference.


8. ITEM: FACT SHEET ABOUT SELECTING TOOLS TO WORK WITH DITA
http://wiki.oasis-open.org/dita-adoption/factSheet
General discussion about content on the page ensued. We covered the
following points:

* Should be support DTDs OR Schemas -- not both. 90% of users use DTDS.

* Ability to generate interoperable content: 
This arises from the fact that when an environment uses multiple authoring
tools, often one tool adds material (proprietary namespaces or other XML
markup) that trips up other tools. We want tools to generate XML that can
be opened with any authoring tool.

* Preserve the original line and character breaks that the author
created:
Different teams might use style sheets; others might rely on line breaks in
the XML code. If a tool (editor or CMS) changes white space, a teams work
flow might be broken.

Su-Laine commented that many of Gershons comments were necessary to
provide enough context (or disambiguation) for a reader to understand these
bullet points. She asked whether we planned to add this contextual
information to the document?

Su-Laine thinks that this document is intended to be used by people new to
DITA who are evaluation tools; for such people, the challenge would be to
take an abstraction such as trace all interrelationships among topics and
turn that into something that can be tested. She asked Are we trying to
create something that can be used for testing? Or are we trying to create a
checklist that a vendor can use to specify their compliance? She commented
that this is a difficult task and asked for clarification of the
committees purpose in pursuing this work.

Gershon commented that this is a work in progress, but one useful artifact
might be a set of tools that users could use to run through an application
and validate a vendors claims.

Su-Laine raised the point that bullet points are not attributed to people;
if an item is vague or she disagrees with it, she doesnt know who to take
the item up with. Also, the 
page is misnamed; it is not a fact sheet  it is an opinion sheet.

Meeting adjourned.

 -- Kristen Eberlein

The document named DITA Adoption minutes, 6 May 2009
(Adoption_TC_6-May-2009.txt) has been submitted by Kristen Eberlein to the
OASIS DITA Adoption TC document repository.

Document Description:


View Document Details:
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/document.php?document_id=32462

Download Document:  
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/32462/Adoption_TC_6-May-2009.txt


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