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Subject: FYI: New Community Project: DITA For Publishers
Below is a copy of an announcement email I sent to the DITA Users mailing list. I copy it here as a courtesy for TC members who do not also follow dita-users. As mentioned below, this project is in anticipation of my intent to eventually start a Publishing subcommittee within the TC. Such a subcommittee would be premature at the moment, both because the community of DITA-using publishers is still pretty small and because I need to continue to focus on helping to get DITA 1.2 done. Since DITA 1.2 is functionally frozen, there's little point in doing official work on Publishing-specific requirements before 1.2 is done. But at the same time, I'm doing project work that has is producing some obvious generic bits that I don't want to have to re-invent and that no Publisher should have to pay me to create for them. Also, as mentioned below, I intend to start coordinating this project's activities with the Business Documents subcommittee as there is obvious overlap and potential synergy there. Cheers, Eliot Original mail: With the backing of Really Strategies, I have started a new community project: DITA For Publishers. The project is hosted on sourceforge at http://dita4publishers.sourceforge.net. The purpose of this project is to provide generic DITA specializations and supporting processing and documentation optimized for the needs of Publishers (books and magazines), as opposed to the needs of Technical Documentation or Business Documents. At some point I expect to integrate this activity with the DITA standard, probably through a Publishing subcommittee of the DITA Technical Committee. Note that this activity has some natural overlap with the Business Documents subcommittee, especially around the need to support narrative documents and provide generic components for more-or-less arbitrary publications. It is definitely my intent to coordinate with the Business Documents subcommittee in order to ensure that we are not duplicating effort. For example, the generic "chapter" and "subsection" topic types I've contributed to this project are probably directly applicable to business documents. To get the project started I have posted in the source code repository initial drafts of the following specializations: Map types: - Publication map (pubmap). Provides an alternative to the standard DITA bookmap map specialization. The pubmap map type is designed to enable representation of arbitrary book and serial publications. It imposes no arbitrary constraints but provides for things you'd almost never have in tech docs, such as topics representing individual pages. It also provides publishing-specific metadata not available in bookmap, such as both 10- and 13-digit ISNBs and ISSNs, etc. [NOTE: what's there now is pretty rough but it's a start. In particular, I want there to be a freely-available alternative to bookmap, which is simply not applicable for non-techdoc Publications.] Topic types: - article topic type. Specialization of <topic> for representing articles. Intended to be used as the root topic of an article-level unit of authoring, often authored as a single XML document with nested subtopics (e.g, sidebar and subsection). - chapter topic type. Specialization of <topic> for representing chapters within books. Intended to be used as the root topic of a chapter-level unit of authoring, often authored as a single XML document with nested subtopics (e.g., sidebar and subsection). - sidebar topic type. Specialization of <topic> that represents an out-of-line unit of titled content. - subsection topic type. Specialization of topic intended to represent arbitrarily-nested subdivisions within articles, chapters, and sidebars. Domain modules: - Formatting domain. Provides elements that indicate arbitrary formatting requests, e.g., breaks, tabs, as well as mathematical equations (through MathMO) and, worse case, embedded desktop publishing data (e.g., InDesign INX interchange XML). Intended to enable reasonably accurate representation of arbitrary formatting, either for legacy publications that must be captured as closely as possible, or to enable publishing through layout tools like InDesign and Quark. The embedding of INX markup is intended primarily as a fallback for handling the typesetting of complex mathematical equations with InDesign. Also provides a generic <art> element, which allows binding of images to a descriptive title and classifying metadata. Intended primarily to allow CMS systems to manage art objects as separate objects without requiring the use of topics and conref. - XML domain. Provides mention elements for identifying mentions of XML constructs. Useful for documents that talk about XML, e.g., documentation for DITA-based systems. - Classification domain. Provides a generic <classification> element, specialized from <data>, that serves as place to plug in specializations of <data> that reflect specific classification taxonomies. It will take me a little while to get a proper project Web site and documentation in place, but if anyone is interested in being a formal developer member, simply email me with your SourceForge ID and I'll add you to the project. There's obviously lots more of this nature that could be added, such as integrating Dublin Core metadata into topic prologs, additional common generic topic types for different types of publications, more map specializations, more complete publication metadata, etc. Cheers, Eliot ---- Eliot Kimber | Senior Solutions Architect | Really Strategies, Inc. email: ekimber@reallysi.com <mailto:ekimber@reallysi.com> office: 610.631.6770 | cell: 512.554.9368 2570 Boulevard of the Generals | Suite 213 | Audubon, PA 19403 www.reallysi.com <http://www.reallysi.com> | http://blog.reallysi.com <http://blog.reallysi.com> | www.rsuitecms.com <http://www.rsuitecms.com>
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