RE: [dita-adoption] Groups - Tools_and_DITA-awareness_2.dita uploaded

["Tony Self" <tself@hyperwrite.com>]

Hi everyone

I think the "Tools and DITA Awareness" document needs to be expanded into a larger whitepaper initially, and then morphed into a compliance guide and template for vendors.

From my reading of the conformance topic in the spec itself, it seems a vendor can claim DITA conformance by writing their own conformance statement. There's no template for such a statement. One requirement of such a statement is that it lists the DITA features that the tool supports, but I couldn't find a definitive list of DITA features. If that's the case, then one vendor might claim "re-use" as a supported DITA feature, while another might claim "topicref" as a supported DITA feature. How does a bewildered new DITA adopter compare these tools?

The purpose of a "Tools and DITA Awareness" document should be to help DITA adopters work out which tools support the DITA features they wish to take advantage of. This is rightly in the domain of the DITA Adoption TC, rather than the DITA TC. I would like to see claims eventually being auditable, or confirmed by a third-party compliance body.

Examples of the problem can easily be found. There is a technical authoring tool that uses a proprietary data storage format that claims to "publish" to XML outputs including "OASIS compliant DITA". It turns out that out-of-the-box you can probably publish some topics to "topic" information types with lots of "required-cleanup" blocks. Technically, that's "OASIS compliant DITA", but practically, it's meaningless. The way I look at it, that tool is not a DITA processor at all. (By the way, some confused participants in the WritePoint DITA Challenges Survey listed that tool as a DITA tool, and identified themselves as DITA adopters.) If vendors can devise their own compliance statements, those statements will end up reading like marketing blurbs, and obfuscate the information most important to the end user.

I am sure that many vendors would welcome a standardised DITA compliance system, because tools that are genuinely DITA aware and DITA compliant need to be distinguished from those that only claim to be.

(Hope this isn't controversial!)

Tony Self



-----Original Message-----
From: su-laine.yeo@justsystems.com [mailto:su-laine.yeo@justsystems.com] 
Sent: Saturday, 20 February 2010 11:02 AM
To: dita-adoption@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [dita-adoption] Groups - Tools_and_DITA-awareness_2.dita uploaded

The document named Tools_and_DITA-awareness_2.dita has been submitted by
Su-Laine Yeo to the OASIS DITA Adoption TC document repository.

Document Description:
This document describes the concepts of DITA-awareness and
specialization-awareness, and explains how these concepts apply to
processors.

This was originally written for the introduction for the DITA
Specification, however the DITA TC decided it was more appropriate for the
DITA Adoption TC. An earlier draft and review comments from the DITA TC are
shown here: http://wiki.oasis-open.org/dita/ToolsDITAawareness

View Document Details:
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/document.php?document_id=36488

Download Document:  
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/36488/Tools_and_DITA-awareness_2.dita