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Minutes of the OASIS
Lightweight DITA SC
Monday, 23 January 2017
Recorded by Keith
Schengili-Roberts
In attendance: Rahel
Bailey, Don Day, Kristen Eberlein, Carlos Evia, Mark
Giffin, Tim Grantham, John Hunt, Jonathan Piasecki,
Michael Priestley, Keith Schengili-Roberts, Birgit
Stackenbrook
Regrets: Scott Hudson
Previous minutes
provisionally approved "pending quibbles" from Kris
[Note from Keith: I have still to hear any further
details about these quibbles].
==Status of the
Committee Note==
Draft #3 of Committee
Note (CN) has been circulated. The new version includes
a revamped table containing elements and attribute
equivalents across XDITA, HDITA and MDITA.
Carlos' opinion is that
the CN—minus the section relating to template
specialization—is now close to being ready for
circulation with the Technical Committee. The template
specialization section needs significant work, and there
are holes elsewhere, but “real progress has been made”.
==Concerns About
Template Specialization==
Kris circulated an email
on January 19th that says while everyone wants
specialization to be easier than it is now, she wasn’t
yet convinced that the new attributes and elements being
proposed for LwDITA were needed. She also expressed
concern that Michael has a vision for template
specialization that has yet to be fully fleshed out in a
documented form.
If we want to consider a
release of LwDITA that does or does not include template
specialization, then it either needs to be in the CN, or
it should be left for a subsequent release.
Michael briefly
explained how a template-based specialization could
become portable so that any topic becomes portable
across systems, and can be used by other toolchains. He
also stated that most of the ideas for template-based
specialization are covered in the slidedeck from the
DITA NA 2016 conference.
Tim responded that he
encountered some open issues that the presentation from
Michael did not address, but otherwise he has not had
any problem understanding what was there. Mark
concurred.
Kris further emphasized
that the SC will eventually need to define the LwDITA
specification in a manner that effectively provides its
algorithms to toolmakers. As Tim commented: “the
specification must be toolable".
To Do:
Michael to meet with
Mark and Tim on Friday, January 27th 2017 to flesh out the ideas around the
template specialization ideas for LwDITA. A draft
section on this will be made available for the next
meeting
Resolved:
Based on this draft, the
SC will decide to either incorporate template
specialization with the CN or not.
To Do:
Michael also offered to talk about template
specialization to the TC on February 7th. Kris will take
this to the TC.
==Issues Relating to
LwDITA Open Questions==
Tim asked whether LwDITA
should attempt to validate the content. As an example of
what he meant by this, he mentioned that Birgit had an
example where she opted for creating a choice model from
sequences, so LwDITA cannot simply ban the creation of
choice models when derived from a sequence; the problem
is that this sort of thing is hard to incorporate within
a validation mechanism. He concluded by saying that in
“full” DITA it is up to the user to ensure that the
specialization is valid.
Michael responded by
saying that we could “hard-code” of these ideas in the
eventual specification. The focus would be on what error
conditions we need to prevent. The only edge cases
identified so far are in-topic, since we are only
working with a single level of specialization. Michael
also suggested that another way to approach this problem
is to punt it in the same manner that “full” DITA does,
and leave it up to the specializer to not break the
system (even though they of course they can). In
response to this last point Birgit asked whether we
could get more guidelines to ensure that people do not
break the specialization.
Another issue Birgit and
Tim encountered: with the dl element there is currently
no way to set the number of its occurrences to more than
one. Michael responded that we may need an equivalent
rule we need to handle this.
A third issue: how
should shortdesc be handled in MDITA and HDITA? Should
it just be the first paragraph by default? This is still
an outstanding issue.
To Do:
Tim to send a refresh of any outstanding issues he has
encountered to the email list.
Continuing Work:
Work
on the next draft of the
introductory LwDITA committee note.