Feedback from Mary McRae

[Kristen James Eberlein <kris@eberleinconsulting.com>]

Hi, fellow TC members.

We got feedback from Mary McRae about the draft of the DITA 1.2 spec yesterday. I've added Mary's comments to a Wiki page, to make them easier to read -- and to make it easier for us to track our progress in fixing issues:

http://wiki.oasis-open.org/dita/CD01

If you browse through the page, you'll see that we are left with four main areas of work or negotiation:

• Need for a namespace document
• (PDF) Stylistic improvements, to better align it with OASIS templates (footers, styles for various levels of titles)
• (PDF) Need to fix text overruns in tables
• (XHTML) Mary has requested changes from how the DITA 1.0 and DITA 1.1 specs were issued:
• Number all topics with section and subsection numbers
  
• Remove link previews generated from <shortdesc> elements, to remove duplication
• Ensure that all topics contain a link to the "Next" topic in the reading order

I've requested feedback from Mary about which issues need to addressed before we can issue the spec for public review. I sincerely hope that she will permit us to finish refining our PDF styling during the public review. However, the first and second changes requested to the XHTML output call for more serious reflection, as they are departures from how we've done things previously and arguably counter-intuitive to DITA principles.

Thoughts from other TC members?

The third XHTML item either already is effectively handled -- the URL at the bottom of each topic takes the reader back to the appropriate bookmark for the topic in the TOC -- or could be addressed by an override that IBM uses for their tutorial specialization.

Best,

Kris

Kristen James Eberlein
Principal consultant, Eberlein Consulting
Secretary, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
Charter member, OASIS DITA Adoption Committee
www.eberleinconsulting.com
+1 919 682-2290; keberlein (skype)