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

["Su-Laine Yeo" <su-laine.yeo@justsystems.com>]

Here's a revised proposal with tweaks to more directly address "output
as DITA" claims:

"Tools that claim to support DITA authoring, or claim to support
producing output as DITA, must allow authors to create arbitrary valid
documents using the complete base DITA vocabulary, i.e. all DITA topic
and map types, including all base element and attribute types. They must
also must also document procedures to support creating arbitrary valid
documents using arbitrary DITA specializations. Tools that claim partial
support of DITA authoring or partial support of producing output as
DITA, but do not support creation of arbitrary valid documents using the
complete base DITA vocabulary, must document what parts of the
vocabulary are not supported."


Su-Laine


-----Original Message-----
From: Su-Laine Yeo [mailto:su-laine.yeo@justsystems.com] 
Sent: Monday, February 22, 2010 3:43 PM
To: dita; tony.self@hyperwrite.com
Subject: RE: [dita] Use of "claims to be DITA aware": Why I Said It Like
That

Tony Self made a good comment on the Adoption TC list today:

"From my reading of the conformance topic in the spec itself, it seems a
vendor can claim DITA conformance by writing their own conformance
statement. There's no template for such a statement. One requirement of
such a statement is that it lists the DITA features that the tool
supports, but I couldn't find a definitive list of DITA features. If
that's the case, then one vendor might claim "re-use" as a supported
DITA feature, while another might claim "topicref" as a supported DITA
feature. How does a bewildered new DITA adopter compare these tools?

...

Examples of the problem can easily be found. There is a technical
authoring tool that uses a proprietary data storage format that claims
to "publish" to XML outputs including "OASIS compliant DITA". It turns
out that out-of-the-box you can probably publish some topics to "topic"
information types with lots of "required-cleanup" blocks. Technically,
that's "OASIS compliant DITA", but practically, it's meaningless. The
way I look at it, that tool is not a DITA processor at all. (By the way,
some confused participants in the WritePoint DITA Challenges Survey
listed that tool as a DITA tool, and identified themselves as DITA
adopters.) If vendors can devise their own compliance statements, those
statements will end up reading like marketing blurbs, and obfuscate the
information most important to the end user."

I think it would be difficult for any committee to agree upon a template
that fairly differentiates the four or five *major* DITA authoring tools
from each other. Worth trying perhaps, but difficult. However,
distinguishing DITA authoring tools from the kind of application that
Tony refers to in the second paragraph above should be considerably
easier, and I suggest that the DITA 1.2 conformance statement try to do
this with something along the lines of the following:

"Tools that claim to support DITA authoring must allow authors to create
and edit arbitrary valid documents using the complete base DITA
vocabulary, i.e. all DITA topic and map types, including all base
element and attribute types. They must also must also document
procedures to support creating and editing arbitrary valid documents
using arbitrary DITA specializations. Tools that claim to partially
support DITA authoring and do not support creation and editing of
arbitrary valid documents using the complete base DITA vocabulary must
document what parts of the vocabulary are not supported. "

This statement would, I hope, mean that tool vendors which only "output
as DITA" have to stop claiming that they support DITA authoring. They
can claim to partially support DITA authoring, with an asterisk and a
long footnote. 

As discussed earlier in the thread, OASIS can't stop people from
claiming anything, but we can empower those who promote critical
thinking.

Cheers,
Su-Laine


Su-Laine Yeo
Solutions Consultant 
JustSystems Canada, Inc.
Office: 778-327-6356 
syeo@justsystems.com
www.justsystems.com 
XMetaL Community Forums: http://forums.xmetal.com/




-----Original Message-----
From: Dick Hamilton [mailto:rlhamilton@frii.com] 
Sent: Monday, February 22, 2010 1:01 PM
To: 'Eliot Kimber'; 'Bruce Nevin (bnevin)'; 'dita'
Subject: RE: [dita] Use of "claims to be DITA aware": Why I Said It Like
That

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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