DITA 3.0 Stage 2 release management (13102) proposal question

Hello,

I am a member of the DITA Technical Communication Subcommittee and have assumed responsibility for advancing proposal 13102, release management, which is currently in stage 2. We have a question about the possibility/advisability of requesting the addition of an element to the bookmap’s frontmatter/booklists element. This element (I’ll call it <release-notes>) would be a placeholder to represent the output of a release management aggregation process.

First, though, I need to explain what we are proposing for release management. I have attached a copy of the current stage 2 proposal for your reference; however, I believe I can summarize it more succinctly. (My words will be many, but still fewer than the proposal.J)

Not wanting to rely on mechanical processes (e.g., diff), we need the ability to alert readers to changes, especially when documents are large. Since we believe that different organizations might want to process these release notes differently (and the handling might be different for different output types as well), we are asking only for the addition of elements to the topic prolog.

These proposed prolog elements are based on bookmap’s bookchangehistory element. (Please see the attached .png file for a summary of the elements covered by the proposal.) Note that the proposal is specifically not asking for any default processing to be provided.

Given that we’re asking only for the addition of elements in which to store release notes, is booklists an appropriate place for an element such as <release-notes>? I’m apprehensive about this because the annotation for the booklists element in the DTD states, “The <booklists> element references lists of various kinds within the book…. It indicates to the processing software that the author wants the lists generated at the <booklists> location.” But we’re not asking for any processing.

If booklists isn’t an appropriate place, is there another? Some of us think that having only elements in the topic with no indication elsewhere as to their use is too open-ended.

Thanks very much.

with best regards

Tom Cihak

NMG Information Development

Freescale

512.996.5072

dita-techcomm message