DITA Technical Committee Meeting Minutes: 2 August 2011

["Bruce Nevin (bnevin)" <bnevin@cisco.com>]

DITA Technical Committee Meeting Minutes: 2 August 2011

Chaired by Don Day <donday@bga.com>
Minutes recorded by Bruce Nevin <bnevin@cisco.com>

The DITA Technical Committee met on Tuesday, 2 August 2011 
at 08:00am PT for 55 minutes.

8:00-8:05 Roll call

 * Regrets: None recorded on the front page 
> Quorum was established.


STANDING BUSINESS:

Approve minutes from previous business meeting:

 * http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201107/msg00029.html (Hackos,
26 July 2011)
> Moved by Don, seconded by Dick Hamilton, passed by acclamation

Subcommittee/liaison reports:

 * OASIS DITA Semiconductor Information Design Subcommittee (catch up next
round)

> Bob Beims (of Freescale, formerly Freescale Semiconductor) reported. 
In the fall of 2008-2009 the industry experienced the biggest downturn
in its history, and in consequence the responsibilities of those still
employed interfered much more with committee work. The SC is gaining
momentum back now, although a lot of people are on vacation this
summer. Two other companies are engaging strongly now, and some tool
vendors getting involved. > By this, we mean not the usual authoring or
CMS tools, but vendors who build EDA (Electronic Design Automation)
tools to create semiconductor products. With these, the value
proposition of DITA extends well beyond tech docs into the design
process. We see the prospect of a silicon chip designer creating a chip
layout with good quality documentation pushed out from the tool using
DITA specializations from this SC. > Freescale gave a presentation at
the CMS conference, that it's not just documentation any more.
Interacting with product design teams in a more tightly coupled way.
Very well received, with lively discussions. Invited to speak to the
Best Practices conference this Fall. Planning to get this message out
across the industry and bring in more participation. This SC needs more
bodies that have more free time for the committee work. > Need to
develop a clean committee draft of the architectural specification for
these specializations. Robert Anderson created scripts to generate DITA
topics from the DTDs to document them. They are difficult to work with,
Bob needs some pointers how to work with them. New participants ask for
help to understand what the SC is doing, and the SC needs documents for
that. People ask if there's an SIDSC starter kit. You get readable
output from the OTK, but 'jumbled'; you need some specialized
processing. Considering stripping out Freescale-specific things from
their corporate XSL code and put up on sourceforge, would like some
guidance on how best to do that.

> Some pointers were provided by TC members. The SC could produce a paper
through the Adoption TC for wider distribution.

 * Next week (9 August): OASIS DITA Technical Communication Subcommittee 
 * Two weeks (15 August): OASIS DITA for Programmers Subcommittee (Lisa
Dyer) 


BUSINESS:

1. ITEM: Triage of DITA complexity list and potential solutions
 * Closed pending open actions. No discussion this week.

2. ITEM: Triage of DITA_1.3_Proposals list
   o Wiki page: DITA_1.3_Proposals
   o Resume with item #13031 (line-through proposal, updated discussions)

We deferred discussion of items that are associated with people who are not
present.

13036, 13059 will be handled together. 
13038, 13039 will be dropped as having no support unless someone comes
forward to champion them by next week. Kris will send email about this.

13040:
> Rob and Kris concur with Dave that the issue is not defined well in the
spec, and that it should be defined. Rob: If we identify unforeseen
opportunities for users getting into trouble with it, we'll revisit it.
 
> Accepted.

13045:
> Gershon is listed as owner. Deb Bissantz suggested that it was the same as
13040, but it's not quite the same. This looks like a review comment on the
language. It's a bug in the model, but not big enough to fix in 1.2; Robert
thinks it's best to treat it as a documentation bug. 
 
> Kris will move it to the appropriate place for that.

13048:
> A process suggestion for how we handle reviews of the spec. 
> Don will move it to a different place in the agenda for discussion.

13049:
> Paul is raising this consistency question for more experienced folks to
judge. Generally, the localization-atts group (translate, xml:lang, dir)
are all available or none. Robert believes that both dir and translate
should be added to the <dita> element. JoAnn: the use of dir is quite
limited. In a set of topics to be translated, why would you send one that
is not to be translated? Robert: the standard sits outside the CMS. It
seems strange to leave universal attributes off, use it at the topic level
but not at the <dita> level. In those cases when it is used, however
rarely, it would be peculiar to have to set it on each individual child of
<dita>. Kris, Don, and Robert propose listing it as a bug fix. Don: The
BusDocs SC has been looking at <dita> as a shell for wrapping topics,
providing a potential use case that could heighten the need. Another use
case is e.g. CSS rendering of topics.
 
> Accepted.

13058:
> We grouped this with 13059. The item notes say it is also related to
13020. We need to be able to override the default cascading rules for
metadata. Use case: within a branch of a map you have a set of topics for
installing software, with platform=windows and platform=linux. Cascading
"windows and linux" setting prevents distinguishing topics on these values
at a lower point in the hierarchy. Chris Nitchie: in PTC, the processor
stops cascading token value a if it is replaced by token value b. Robert:
IBM has a different proprietary solution, and Jeremy Griffith has another
approach. We need to deal with this use case so that the spec supports a
standards-based approach. The solution should also address how to apply
filtering in different branches so defined. This also addresses the issue
in 13036. (See Robert's notes on this item.)
 
> Accepted.

13060, 13061:
> Stan Doherty: The Help SC drafted fairly detailed proposals about 2 years
ago. DITA help developers need to manage context-sensitive help IDs and
help window attributes. Companies would like to have one semantic markup
for these things. At present, it has to be done outside DITA. Robert: The
resourceid metadata was intended to do part of this; it will become more
useful with proposal 13008. Stan: if all we need is a canonical use case
for something already planned for 1.3, we would welcome it. Robert will
attend the Help SC meeting to clarify this. It would need some extension to
cover everything raised in this item.
 
> Accepted.

13067:
> requires Eric Sirois to be present.

ACTION (Robert): ask Eric to attend next week to speak to this.

8:55 PT Adjourn