RE: [dita] Audience of the arch spec

Here, here! Agree completely.

We are the folks who have to make DITA a reality in organizations and I know for myself I spend an inordinate amount of time explaining things. Most of the time we interpret the spec (functionality of DITA) for them in plain language and help them to understand what they “really” need to know to actually use it. And we help them to understand the ramifications of certain decisions like conrefs. I’d like to be able to focus on the important pieces, the content and the content strategy and not the mechanics.

Not every organization can afford a DITA “interpretor” they need to be able to understand DITA from other resources.

From: Joann Hackos [mailto:joann.hackos@comtech-serv.com]
Sent: Thursday, October 01, 2009 10:59 AM
To: DITA TC
Subject: [dita] Audience of the arch spec

Hi All,
I continue to be concerned about our definition of the audience of the arch spec. We seem to have two camps: the XML geeks and the user community advocates. Certainly, the Adoption TC needs to direct explanations to the user community, but does the arch spec need to be so completely obtuse?

In fact, it is quite schizophrenic. Read the Learning and Training arch spec. It’s actually in plain language and speaks to the user community. Compare that with some of the other sections, which should communicate to a broad audience. Each section of the arch spec should have a user-friendly introductory explanation of the feature (at least).

It seems that we are getting to sound more and more like software developers who insist that the users know what wonderful, magical work they did in creating the software. Makes the documentation unusable.

Just ranting, of course.
JOAnn

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