LwDITA Meeting Minutes for Nov 28, 2016

[Keith Schengili-Roberts <keith.roberts@ixiasoft.com>]

Apologies for getting this out so late. The program I use to record these meeting failed, so am going from my original notes and memory.

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Minutes of the OASIS Lightweight DITA SC

Monday, 28 November 2016

Recorded by Keith Schengili-Roberts

 

In attendance: Don Day, Stanley Doherty, Kristen Eberlein, Carlos Evia, Mark Giffin, Tim Grantham, Scott Hudson, Michael Priestley, Keith Schengili-Roberts

Regrets: None.

Previous meeting’s minutes were approved with suggested amendments by Tim Grantham.

==Status of Deliverables Roadmap==

Prior to this meeting, Michael sent out an email outlining a roadmap on the status of deliverables.

Specialization architecture validation work stream:

·         Draft document type update - Mark Giffin

·         Template-based specialization transformation - Tim Grantham

·         Web service setup for testing - Don Day

·         Domain testing - generating specializations from templates - Jan Benedictus, Amber Swope

·         Update specialization architecture if required - team discussion

Specification development work stream:

·         Outline - Carlos Evia

·         Authoring environment setup - Don Day

·         Create/review reuse with full spec for element descriptions - Kris Eberlein

·         Complete topic specification - XML - Carlos/Kris

·         Complete map specification - XML - Carlos/Kris

·         Complete specialization specification - XML - Carlos/Kris

·         Add syntax for Markdown - Carlos Evia, Mark Giffin

·         Add syntax for HTML5 - Carlos Evia, Mark Giffin

·         Review specification before sharing with main TC - team discussion

Discussion followed, and everyone was in agreement that this outline and those assigned to it made sense.

==Status of TC Note==

Carlos had a call with Kris and they have collaborated on this. Carlos also mentioned that he has created some examples of the syntax calls to help illustrate how they would work. Carlos reported that the status of the committee note is healthy and that a draft ought to be ready by the end of this week.

Kris suggested that the draft version be circulated among the members of the SC prior to submission to the TC. Kris will make a first working draft from this available as of this Friday morning (Dec 2nd) to Kavi and subsequently plans to hold a meeting the week after to discuss with the other members of the SC.

Mark volunteered to write additional content relating to specialization.

==Status of Specification==

The document will be called: “Introduction to Lightweight DITA”, which will be a committee note.

Michael argued that it is too soon to have a specification draft, so the idea will be that a committee note will be the stepping stone towards something more formal. The committee note will be sent to the TC when done. After it has been commented upon by the TC members, corrections/changes made and then released to the public, work can begin on a more formal specification.

==Status of Schema Generation==

Question from Michael: has anybody been able to produce working DTDs from existing RNG?

Mark responded by saying that he is using oXygen to render the existing RNG to a DTD. He is also working on some open source code that would process this automatically from the command line.

Tim mentioned a plug-in for the DITA-OT that generates a DTD from the RNG, but that this may be more involved that we need.

Tim also mentioned that the LwDITA RNG follows the same structural conventions as the DITA 1.3 specification, as Tim whittled the DITA 1.3 RNG down in order to produce the LwDITA RNG files.

Kris asked whether a monolithic rather than a modular approach may be preferable. Tim responded by saying that his approach comes up with two modules, which may be preferable as the second output allows for specializations. 

Michael asked if we want to support multi-level specialization in LwDITA? This question was punted as everyone agreed that we should see what the survey results had to say on this issue. Michael noted however that we seem to be moving from doing this, at least for v1.0 of LwDITA.

It was agreed that further discussion on scheme generation for LwDITA would continue offline.

==Discussion of Poll Results==

Carlos sent out summary results of the poll on October 31 to the members of the SC list.

There were 80 total participants, but note that they were not required to answer all of the questions (i.e. responses to individual questions were optional). Primarily responders were from the Yahoo! DITA Users group, though there were a few people who came to the survey via a tweet that had been sent out.

Some results from the poll:

- HTML as main output type was something that people wanted

- Cross-silo content sharing is very important

- Markdown authoring is something a lot of people are interested in; Carlos mentioned that when he talked about Markdown-based DITA authoring at a recent conference much of the questions he received centered on that subject.

- As for the responses to the question “I do not plan to specialize DITA topics” 87% of the respondents said “yes” This strongly suggests that the SC should aim to only include one level of specialization. Michael suggested that for a 1.0 release that this be the approach we take.

Carlos went on to note that the numbers for some of the responses was small, but that on the whole he thought that what we did get is good and representative. The answers to the poll are things the SC should take account of going forward.   

Carlos also noted that this information is publicly available, and that people can comment/blog about it freely.

==Discussion of TC Review and How to Communicate with TC==

Mark is currently on the TC and is representing the interests of the SC for now. Carlos will start in this role beginning in January 2017.

==Trip Report on tekom/DITA Europe/DITA-OT Day==

General discussion by those who attended these shows. Keith noted that tekom seemed to be much more open to the idea of DITA than the previous year. Kris talked about her presentation at DITA-OT day that talked about the possibility of founding a non-for-profit organization for handling development work for such things as the DITA standard and DITA-OT.

 

Meeting adjourned at 12:01pm EDT.

 

Cheers!

 

-

Keith Schengili-Roberts

Market Researcher and DITA Evangelist

 

IXIASOFT 

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