RE: [dita] Use of "claims to be DITA aware": Why I Said It Like That

["Dick Hamilton" <rlhamilton@frii.com>]

Eliot,

> > What do you mean by "judging" marketing claims?
> > I may have missed this being a relative newcomer,
> > but I didn't think the TC was planning to
> > take an active role in judging conformance.
> 
> The TC makes the law, it doesn't enforce it.
> 
Glad to hear that. I thought it was unlikely, but since there was at
least the implication in some of the messages in this thread, I thought
the point should be explicitly addressed.

Thanks again for the clarification.

Dick
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Eliot Kimber [mailto:ekimber@reallysi.com] 
> Sent: Monday, February 22, 2010 12:39 PM
> To: Dick Hamilton; Bruce Nevin (bnevin); dita
> Subject: Re: [dita] Use of "claims to be DITA aware": Why I 
> Said It Like That
> 
> 
> On 2/22/10 1:21 PM, "Dick Hamilton" <rlhamilton@frii.com> wrote:
> 
> > Bruce and Eliot,
> > 
> > A couple of points/questions:
> > 
> > From Bruce:
> >> 
> >> My thinking: A list of features is useful to vendors because
> >> it helps to level the marketing field, but it is not essential
> >> for the TC when it is called upon to judge partial conformance.
> >> 
> >> <snip>
> >> 
> >> This presumes that we do have a process in place that brings
> >> vendors before us for judgement of their marketing claims
> >> (there's that word).
> >> 
> > What do you mean by "judging" marketing claims? I may have 
> missed this
> > being a relative newcomer, but I didn't think the TC was planning to
> > take an active role in judging conformance.
> 
> The TC makes the law, it doesn't enforce it.
> 
> It is the job of either users (i.e., "The DITA Community") or 
> some 3rd party
> certification agency (which does not exist for DITA as far as 
> I know) to
> judge whether or not a given processor that claims DITA 
> awareness does or
> does not in fact conform. The most the TC can do is provide a 
> spec that
> provides objective means by which conformance can be 
> determined by informed
> users.
> 
> This is part of our struggle with conformance (and why to 
> some degree it
> didn't really matter that DITA had no conformance clause 
> before DITA 1.2):
> the nature of DITA is that for many features there is an 
> inherent degree of
> fuzziness as to what is or can be required. This is because 
> the nature of
> DITA processing is ultimately in the service of producing 
> various outputs
> and the nature of those outputs is necessarily determined by 
> the actor that
> creates them.
> 
> There are very few MUST statements in the spec, and most of 
> those relate to
> addressing, which is one of the few clearly deterministic and 
> invariant
> aspects of DITA processing.
> 
> The most we can for most things is that if a processor does 
> something that
> is covered by the DITA spec it should do it the way the spec says.
> 
> Remember too that DITA is primarily a *data* standard, not a 
> *processing*
> standard. That is, what is really important is consistency among DITA
> *documents*, for which the rules are much clearer and much 
> easier to test. A
> DITA vocabulary module either conforms or it doesn't and 
> documents that use
> that vocabulary module are either valid or they're not.
> 
> To that degree, DITA serves its purpose as helping to enable 
> and ensure data
> interchange over the widest possible scope.
>  
> Cheers,
> 
> E.
> 
> -- 
> Eliot Kimber
> Senior Solutions Architect
> "Bringing Strategy, Content, and Technology Together"
> Main: 610.631.6770
> www.reallysi.com
> www.rsuitecms.com
> 
> 
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