RE: [dita-lightweight-dita] My intro for the list

["Tom Magliery" <tom.magliery@justsystems.com>]

Hi everyone,

 

I've been paying attention to DITA since we started working seriously on DITA support in XMetaL about 2005 or so, and representing JustSystems on the OASIS TC since around the beginning of work on DITA 1.3. I cringe a little when I think about when I started working with markup.

 

Similar to Kris's experience (and probably everyone's), we've seen many XMetaL customers for whom the complexity of DITA is overkill. We've long thought about providing a "simplified DITA" user experience in XMetaL, but have not had the resources to bring anything to the market. Having a simplified standard DITA vocabulary out there would be a very useful thing for us and other vendors, not only to spare us the resources of developing our own, but so as to promote interoperability.

 

I'll be participating to provide any expertise I can about authoring requirements, and to bring the work of the committee back to our R&D team for consideration. (Though I'll be off to somewhat of a quiet start due to being out of the office for possibly 7 of the next 9 Mondays!) From our perspective, there's a lot of "doesn't matter" what the spec might turn out to be -- whatever it is, I hope we'll enable authoring in it -- but I'll be watching for any situations where it actually does.

 

mag

 

From: dita-lightweight-dita@lists.oasis-open.org [mailto:dita-lightweight-dita@lists.oasis-open.org] On Behalf Of Michael Priestley
Sent: Tuesday, September 16, 2014 5:34 PM
To: dita-lightweight-dita@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [dita-lightweight-dita] My intro for the list

 

As we discussed in the meeting yesterday, I'm kicking off a round of intros so we can all get to know each other a little better.

I've been with DITA since day 1, and was the co-editor of the DITA 1.0 and 1.1 specification. I'm excited about lightweight DITA because it gives us a chance to apply the lessons we've learned with full DITA in crafting a high-functioning but lightweight architectural subset.

My current role at IBM is one of content technology strategist, with a scope that lets me influence (but not necessarily direct) technology development across many different content development and delivery organizations, with both internal and external audiences. Lightweight DITA is a part of every content technology strategy deck I put together in IBM. It's a core piece of the architecture we need to allow content to be truly portable, across systems, skill sets, and formats.

The highest priority scenarios I'm focusing on for IBM use (with help from other IBMers) are:

- marketing content and HTML5 mappings
- training content and EPUB mappings
- developer content and both markdown and HTML5 mappings

Michael Priestley, Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM)
Enterprise Content Technology Strategist
mpriestl@ca.ibm.com
http://dita.xml.org/blog/michael-priestley