Action: Updating conformance statement (Kimber, due 1 September 2009)

[ekimber <ekimber@reallysi.com>]

I have made a pass over the conformance statement and updated the file in
SVN. Need to work out where it should go in the overall structure--have
provided a proposal to Kristen Eberlein. My current thinking is that it
should follow the Introduction to DITA section, where that section and the
Conformance sections are then peers to the Arch Spec and Lang Ref, e.g.:

- About the DITA 1.2 Spec
- Introduction to DITA
- Conformance
- Architectural Specification
  - DITA Markup
  - DITA Processing
  - Specialization
  - Customization
- Language Reference

I reviewed the OASIS document on writing conformance specs. I'm not
completely happy with our current conformance spec in terms of its
organization but I think it's good enough for 1.2.

We still need to make as much of a pass as we can over the lang ref to add
the appropriate conformance level for specific behaviors described therein.
This is no small undertaking, I realize, but it needs to be done if the
conformance clause is to have much meaning.

At a minimum, if people can comment on that aspect of the language spec as
they are reviewing it we can try to implement the non-controversial comments
during the upcoming review period. Even creating a list of those topics that
don't need to be examined would help: there are 534 topics in the langref at
present. If we can narrow that down to say 50 that require updated
conformance language, that would make the task tractable (that's only 8
hours at 10 minutes a topic :-).

Cheers,

Eliot

----
Eliot Kimber | Senior Solutions Architect | Really Strategies, Inc.
email:  ekimber@reallysi.com <mailto:ekimber@reallysi.com>
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