Groups - DITA TC Meeting Minutes 6 May 2014 uploaded

[Nancy Harrison<nharrison@infobridge-solutions.com>]

        Submitter's message
        
Minutes of the OASIS DITA TC
Tuesday, 6 May 2014
Recorded by N. Harrison
link to agenda for this meeting:	
	https://wiki.oasis-open.org/dita/PreviousAgendas

regrets:   Tom Magliery, Mark Myers  

Standing Business
=================
Approve minutes from previous business meeting:
https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201404/msg00123.html (22 April, Nancy Harrison)         
Proposed by Kris, seconded by Dick, approved by TC

Subcommittee Reports
Adoption SC:
Joann gave an update from the TC meeting yesterday, 
- they went over Bob Thomas's draft of the troubleshooting feature article. They offered ideas, and Jacqui Samuels volunteered to work with him to make it more tutorial-like; 
- discussed webinar on new ISO rel mgmt standard. 
- talked to Laura Feldman about and article on 'shortdesc'; it's an issue for lots of organizations adopting DITA
- Eliot talked about and article on 'DITA for small teams' 
- Jacqui is working on article based on their SWOT analysis of DITA (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats).


Announcements
	none


Business
========
1. DITA 1.3 progress
- Redesign of "Contains and Contains by" (Anderson)
Robert; no change since last mtg, it's on my agenda for this week; I didn't get a chance at the conference to sit down with Eliot to master transform arcana.
Eliot; I did sit down with Chris and showed him the magic scripts.
Kris; at some point, we may want to just scrap our idea of having different distribution packages for 1.3; the redesign is a key dependency for that.
- First spec review (Eberlein & Anderson)
Kris; no changes in spec review, there are still about 50 comments out there that Robert and I have to accommodate, including 3 asking for real re-architecting of keys/keyscopes.  We need to do that, but haven't been able to do it yet.
Robert; After a deadline today for 'real' work, hopefully can work on this after that.
- Transformation utilities and DITA 1.3 grammar files 
Eliot; I'm currently running into an issue that I can't resolve, i.e. version-specific shells for L&T topics aren't validating; once I get those working, then I should be 100% complete. Once I do that, I just need to go over all the proposals and make sure all aspects of all proposals are in the RNG/XSD/DTD. Will also have an automated check method from Jirka
Kris; Is there anyone who can help you?
Eliot; I'm looking at everything; may be reaching out to anyone I think can help in the next few days.


2. Rehash of CMS/DITA NA America conference
- Kris; 10 out of 16 voting TC members were there, a record %
- Joann; sessions were generally well-atended, especially 1.3 related sessions; many new users at conference, 
- Michael; Was it still primarily techcomm folks
- Joann; lots of L&T folks, and those L&T sessions were well attended; also many from heavy machinery industry, John Deere, etc. Also, medical devices and medical content representation, so, an increase in diversity.
- Michael; how is 'medical devices' separate from 'medical content'?
- Joann; 'medical content' is descriptions of medical procedures.
- Kris; my client 'Healthwise' was there; they're a portal for medical content.
- Don; anyone from regulatory community?
- Joann; yes, we're seeing an uptick in that; it's a natural for DITA. they tend to have multiple authors and use MSWord and have a terrible time with it.
In vendors' exhibits, George Bina's review on iPad was good. New simplified editing environments (word-like) are improving the appeal by making presentation of DITA simpler-looking, so other audiences don't see it as a significant problem.
- Don; what about any of the receiving federal agencies on the consuming end?
- Joann; no, they don't come, it would be good if OASIS helped us out on that.
- Kris; how can they?
- Joann; Maybe with some outreach activity, i.e. how many agencies are OASIS members, so if we did a webinar, who should we aim it to? 
- Kris; I attended all TC members sessions and thought they were all excellent, and very well-attended (Chris, Stan, Eliot, Kris's 'intro to 1.3' called out)
- Stan; I made an effort to recruit people to do TC/SC committee work; got some interest in writing/reviewing work.
- Joann; I keep making speeches to get folks emrolled, esp. if their companies are in OASIS.
- Stan; I'd be surprised if we didn't pick up a few people in the next few months.
- Joann; It would be good to do a webinar to reach out to folks about what they want in the next version of DITA.  When might we have a 1.3 webinar?
- Kris; joann, when do you think?
- Joann; late June??
- Kris; sounds good.


3. New item: Light-weight DITA (Michael Priestley)
    http://dita.xml.org/blog/overview-of-lightweight-dita-xdita-and-hdita (Overview on dita.xml.org
    http://dita.xml.org/blog/of-conferences-and-webinars-on-lightweight-dita-and-such (Upcoming Webinar on May 14) 
Michael gave overview; couple of slide decks, overview posted some draft doc types and updated presentation, both on slideshare.  The main recent changes are
- changes that aren't yet 'dita, meet XML'; 
- a chance to intercept 'cycle of destruction' adopt system, i.e. organizations introduce DITA, then add features so it's too complex so no one wants to use it, over and over again. 
- pendulum swinging between 'too complex' and 'not complex enough'.
- 'Start with Lightweight DITA and if you need more features, gradually move up to fuller DITA. But if XML is abhorrent, then here's a mapping between DITA Light (with some extensions) and HTML5 subset w/some extensions.  My blogpost has a mapping between DITA Light and HTML5. 
In IBM, some folks hate DITA, and they don't even want to use Word, but simple web forms or 'Markdown' syntax.  Idea is to give DITA adopters access to wider content. this opens up opportunities in both directions, provides integration point against whole corporate content spectrum. We definitely need to start a SC and get stuff going; talking with Kris on use cases and personas, and w/Don on prototypes. Michael presented at Intelligent Content conf. last year about applicability of DITA Light to a subset of marketing content; it maps pretty well.
- Joann; we're already using DITA for marketing and for HR content with one company; Denise Griggs had a presentation at CMS/DITA last year on using DITA for HR content. For another company, we helped them use DITA to produce customer brochures; the marketing folks can produce a custom product catalog when they go to a customer site. 
- Kris; Tony Self did a presentation at DITA 2008 on infomapping in Australia so people could put articles together from data in a database.
- Joann; At ComTech, we're doing all our proposals in DITA.
- Chris; we do all our propoasals and functional specs in DITA, and can create 'pre-baked' docs.  This has to be part of DITA 2.0, so DITA 2.0 maps have to be able to link to non-DITA stuff.
- Joann; in the Adoption TC, we've talked about the need for other specializations that can become part of a document.
- Kris; other views on good use cases for DITA Light?
- Eliot; it's certainly good for the publishing world; SMEs in that space aren't going to author in anything but Word at this point, so 'markdown' is a big thing
- Michael; Markdown isn't targeting everything, but 'markdown profiles', could apply to Word, OpenOffice as well as HTML5. To get use from this, the profile has to have at least a title, a body and sections...
- Chris; the biggest problem with markdown is they don't support tables.
- Michael; they have an extension to do that
- Chris; but it's hard to use
- Eliot; does markdown provide features for structuring text at all?
- Don; it dosn't lend itself to that
- Eliot; so you have to use some private tagging convention?
- Kris; back to DITA Light; I'd love to be able to create a document in Word or GoogleDocs or ODF and be able to save it in DITA. Michael, what do you see as possible in terms of roundtripping in both directions?
- Michael; It's all about locating common denominators; so if you set parameters on DITA elements that eliminate attributes and nesting, you basically have Markdown. In Markdown, if you eliminate interactivity and multimedia, you can get to DITA Light.  Hopefully, for Word and ODF, if you use a certain template, and go with certain rules, you can go to DITA Light, and converse will also be true, so we can get to reliable round-tripping. On the DITA side, you have a validating doc, on non-XML side. So DITA doesn't have to through XML to get to Markdown, you can constrain it down to a point that can be supported in other formats. The idea is that there can be many intersection points, and DITA becomes the common thread that ties together many content streams.
- Kris; I would love to see a slide showing this, with a story, to make it mroe clear for me; what you can and can't do.  Also, do you also see this to opening the marketplace to lighter-weight tools for people to use?
- Michael; It has to; on the XML [DITA] side, we'd need lighter weight tools, on the non-DITA side we'd need DITA profiles, e.g. madcap flare could be used for this.  We need to make the case for DITA as a standard; Madcap does a lot of good stuff, but it's proprietary. If you're using it, why isn't there a mapping to a standard?  There needs to be pressure from customers of these tools to add a DITA connection to these tools. We need to be able to integrate these tools into a common content stream; 'you don't solve your silo problem by building a bigger silo.' If your silos can't communicate, [with DITA was an integration point], it's a real cost to the enterprise.  
- Joann; that would be a really good white paper



4. New item: Review of action items that emerged from the "Complexity discussion," late summer 2011
    https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201108/msg00001.html (Eberlein, August 2011) 
Kris; please look at mail at link above and think about it for what you might want to do; will bring it up next week.



meeting closed at 11:58
        
-- Nancy Harrison

Document Name: DITA TC Meeting Minutes 6 May 2014

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Submitter: Nancy Harrison
Group: OASIS Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) TC
Folder: Meeting Notes
Date submitted: 2014-05-10 08:24:50