Re: [dita] who complains about complexity of DITA?

[Michael Priestley <mpriestl@ca.ibm.com>]

I'm also curious about this. Even before
we had constraints, we had basic DITA modularity, which lets you include
or exclude whole domains of elements at a time. And the doctypes we package
with the spec do exactly that. 

Simple number of elements in the spec
as a whole shouldn't be a measure of complexity for either authors or architects,
since you only include or work with the elements that matter for your domain.
For example, the learning and training specializations don't increase complexity
for authors or architects in basic tech comm.

So do we really have a complexity problem,
that is it's too hard to use DITA or create new DITA specializations? Or
do we have a communication problem, about how to use DITA (start small,
include what you need, don't try to use stuff you don't need)? Or are there
other problems, outside the domain of the spec, like customizing processing
flows, that get reflected back on the spec even though it's really something
outside our control?

I don't mean to dismiss complaints about
complexity, but like you I think we need to understand the actual motivations/causes
of the complaints before we can usefully react. 

Michael Priestley, Senior Technical
Staff Member (STSM)
Lead IBM DITA Architect 
mpriestl@ca.ibm.com
http://dita.xml.org/blog/25

From:	"Bruce Nevin (bnevin)" <bnevin@cisco.com>
To:	<dita@lists.oasis-open.org>, <dita-adoption@lists.oasis-open.org>
Date:	12/06/2010 11:01 AM
Subject:	[dita] who complains about complexity of DITA?

---

Are we entirely
clear about the use contexts in which users find the number of elements
onerous or confusing? Obviously, the authoring environment is one.  But
do architects also object? Do the tools vendors object? This seems less
likely to me, but it's not something to guess, we should find out. And
is that (the number of elements) the only complexity that they object to?

The constraints mechanism can neatly address the perceived complexity in the authoring environment. (Be it noted that existing mechanisms provided by [some?] authoring tools to hide elements from authors apparently do not reduce these complaints, maybe because the complaints come from users who don't make use of them.) But creating and managing constraints is another layer for architects and designers to deal with.

    /Bruce