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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.