Re: [dita] "The DITA iceberg" presentation at DITA Europe 2016

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

Maybe we can separate the pain points raised in Leigh's presentation and possible solutions:

Pain points

1. Our starter set of DTDs has more in it than many people want.
2. Many people don't understand that they can configure their own document-type shells; they think the start set of shells ARE DITA. If they know that they can configure shells, it still might be too troublesome to implement them. For example, a small company with a handful of writers using version control on the file system will have to install doctype plug-ins whenever they upgrade their authoring tool or DITA-OT instance.
   
3. Constraints are ridiculously time consuming to implement in DTDs. It's relatively simple to subset a domain -- but to remove base elements (for example, <pre>) requires constraining every element that can contain the base element. It's much easier in RNG. And it just doesn't really work in XSD.

Possible solutions

1. DITA 2.0 gives us the opportunity to modify what we include in the starter set of shells. We also could distribute other sets of shells ... I suspect that if we wanted to entertain that, we should NOT have them be part of the standard. We could "release" them as a package associated with a ZIP file.
2. We need to do more education about configuration.
3. Maybe we need to move to a model where we encourage folks to configure, specialize, and constrain in RNG -- keeping to all the rules driven by modularization -- but them convert the RNG to a monolithic DTD for use in production. Yes, this will limit ease of interchange, but ...
4. Drop support for XSD.
   

Best,
Kris

Kristen James Eberlein
Chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
Principal consultant, Eberlein Consulting
www.eberleinconsulting.com
+1 919 682-2290; kriseberlein (skype)

On 11/16/2016 10:45 PM, Tom Magliery wrote:

I love the idea of a smaller "standard DITA", and I look forward to months/years of entertaining discussion while "what's in" gets hammered out.

mag


-----Original Message-----
From: dita@lists.oasis-open.org [mailto:dita@lists.oasis-open.org] On Behalf Of Kristen James Eberlein
Sent: Tuesday, November 15, 2016 11:19 PM
To: DITA TC
Subject: [dita] "The DITA iceberg" presentation at DITA Europe 2016

Attached is a PDF from a session done by Leigh White, IXIASOFT, at this 
year's DITA Europe conference. (I'll follow up later with some 
additional PDFs from other sessions.)

I'd like to ask TC members to read and consider it; I'm looking forward 
to discussion on the list.