Groups - DITA TC Meeting Minutes 15 August 2017 uploaded

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

        Submitter's message
        ActionItems:
1.  Bob will try to resolve issues related to Kris's feedback on spec style sheets.
2.  Kris will add footnotes to list of stage 1 proposals for 2.0
3.  LwD needs to add a note to CN about setting appropriate expectations about compatibility /interop and MDITA/HDITA topics that go beyond what's described in the current docuoment.  Kris will help with this.
4.  LwD SC put together a schedule that includes DITAWeb and a timetable for releasing CN


=================================================
Minutes of the OASIS DITA TC
Tuesday,  8 August 2017
Recorded by Nancy Harrison
link to agenda for this meeting:	
https://wiki.OASIS-open.org/dita/PreviousAgendas


Attendance:
Robert Thomas, Eric Sirois, Christopher Nitchie, Eliot Kimber, Alan Houser, 
Nancy Harrison, Mark Giffin, Carlos Evia, Maria Essig, Kristen Eberlein, 
Bill Burns, Carsten Brennecke  

Business
========
1.  Roll call
        Regrets: Robert Anderson. Dawn Stevens, Dick Hamilton, Tom Magliery, Scott Hudson 


2.  Approve minutes from previous business meeting:
        https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201708/msg00018.html (Nancy Harrison, posted Mon, 14 Aug 2017 00:43:42 -0700 (PDT)) 
moved by Kris, 2nd by Alan, approved by TC


3.  Announcements:
        New TC members: None 


4.  Action items
     o   6 September 2016
         -  Kris: Revise subject scheme example topic pulled from errata 01 
     o   4 October 2016:
         -  Tom: Work on aggregated minutes for 2005-2011 (IN PROGRESS) 
     o   04 April 2017
         -  All TC members consider what they want to see on the new DITA.xml.org site for the DITA TC 
     o   25 July 2017
         -  Kris or Robert: Handle errata item discussed and approved on 25 July 2017 (COMPLETED)
         -  Stan: Review target audiences thoroughly in next review of the committee note
         -  Tech comm subcommittee: Consider whether to make proposal to allow steps to nest a stage 1 proposal
         -  LwDITA subcommittee:
                (Committee note) Mention that markup for variable text only supported in DITA-OT-2.5.1 and later 
     o   8 August 2017
         -  Kris: Set firm date and time for meeting about multimedia domain (COMPLETED)
         -  Kris: Send Carlos info about alias for LwDITA SC chair (COMPLETED)
         -  Kris: Open TC Admin requests for official GitHub repos for subcommittees (COMPLETED for techComm and LwDITA subcommittees; waiting on names of maintainers and GitHub user accounts for Learning & Training subcommittee)
         -  Kris: Send e-mail to Nancy, Tom, Stan, and Bob about testing DITA-OT 2.5.1 PDF style sheets (COMPLETED)
         -  Kris, Nancy, Stan, Tom: Test new PDF style sheets (COMPLETED by Kris)
Nancy; still in process; building, haven't done the review yet
         -   Alan: Send minutes from LwDITA DTD call to the TC list 
Alan; not done yet


5.  TC and SC minutes
        Best practices from OASIS Technical Advisory Board (TAB)
        https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201708/msg00006.html
        What changes do we need to make to our practices? To standardize across TC and subcommittees? 
- Nancy; addition of attendance names is a nuisance, they have to be copied individually... Also, I've already responded to Chet noting that his guideline wrt including both agenda, and the discussion of each agenda item, implies a lot of duplication, and we don't do that, and don't want to do that.  His response semmed to imply that he's willing to revisit that guideline.
- Kris; I can send a screen grab of my attendance list after meetings.
- Nancy; thx, that would be useful.
- Kris; SC folks?
- Bob; I'm still reading the mail...
- Kris; for TC members scheduling a non-regular meeting, please use the OASIS calendar, and the attendance log associated with the attendance.  They mostly want to keep things transparent.
- Carlos, for LwD, for a long time we didn't take minutes, but now we're following the guidelines.



6.  Official OASIS GitHub repositories for subcommittees
        Any common best practices?
        (On hold until Robert returns) 
- Kris; have SCs gotten info from  Robin Cover about the repos being set up?
[yes for both Carlos and Bob; we don't know about L&T because neither Amber nor Dawn were here]]


7.  Specification style sheets
        Results from testing? 
- Kris; Bob, anything you want to add? I sent some comments already.
- Bob; I'll take an action item to resolve your 'doesn't play nice with others' comment.
- Kris; if you could also look at actual issues, e.g., notices showing up where they shouldn't, that would be great. 
***ActionItem:  Bob will try to resolve issues related to Kris's feedback on spec style sheets.



8.  Footnotes:'
        Experience of current DITA TC members and their clients
        footnote element proposed by LwDITA SC 
[see Kris;'s and Eliot's messages on footnotes.
Other comments, 
- Nancy; one of my clients uses a completely customized stylesheet for notes to effectively create footnotes in their material.
- Bob; footnote model is difficult for some authors to understand, but it's inherently complicated, don't know how to fiz that.
- BillB; I like Eliot's first suggestion in his mail
- Mark, in LwD we studied this a lot, then added our footnote model, then removed it because it wasn't part of full DITA.
- Carlos; at one point we had both fnref and a specialized section for collecting footnotes, but we failed to develop a use case for those, until now, 
- Kris; for now, the suggestion is to have a specialization of xref as a convenience, with type automatically set to 'fn', just as folks use mapref. But this is a murky area, LwD has proposed things and backed off because they're not in 1.3.   This has catapulted us into a real discussion on footnotes: how do we use them? do they need to be redesigned? ...
- Chris; I'm all on board with a possible re-architecting of footnotes...  One question I have, though is; are footnotes actually lightweight? i.e., should they be in LwD?
- Carlos; marketing folks consider this essential, won't use LwD without them.
- Kris; we have the potential to say; LwD can't do things that aren't reflected in DITA, but a redesign of footnotes is on 2.0 schedule, at which point LwD would get the new version also.
- Alan; is the requirement for footnotes from one particular contributoor, or is it a general requirement?
- Eliot; if LwD is meant for marketing, then you need them for legal language, so it's a general requirement.
- Chris; I just wanted to make sure they were a requirement.
- Chris; so we either need to do a deep analysis in the LwD timefroame, or LwD needs to go out with the imperfect fn markup we have in 1.3.
- Kris; my inclination is to go with the imperfect fn design, rather than have LwD and 1.3 be incompatible.
- Carlos; so do we keep the LwD footnote design?
- Chris; no, we need to go out with something campatible with 1.3.
- Nancy; so is the idea that we do a redesign of footnotes for 2.0, and send out a LwD with new footnotes then?
- Kris; yes, I think we do a real redesign of footnotes at 2.0 with LwD use cases in mind.  And there will be a need to be clear on what is in base DITA, or not.
- Chris; so for LwD, will fn be treated as an inline?
- Kris; wasn't the main issue the question of 'where to be able to put fn's within LwD topics?'
- Carlos; some rules were that we wanted fn to be a block, and only available by reference only.
- Kris; and probably only to allow fns within new specialized section. I think to be compatible, that we need to allow fns to be inline elements available in standard body text.
- Chris; fn by reference is a best practice, but mutiple refs to a fn might be an advanced case.
- Kris; what was the rationale for limiting fns to by ref only?
- Carlos; to keep it simple and keep it consistent with HTML5
- Chris; it might have worked for keeping things simple, but the onus goes onto the processor.  I know a number of places where they copy and paste footnotes, and leave it to style sheets to aggregate and collate them. 
- Eliot; that method wouldn't work for me...
- Kris; I wonder if Chris's method, i.e., a standard single-use fn, would work as an initial release.
- Bob; I've seen marketing cases where they repeat a legal item caveat across chapters.
- Eliot; I've nevers seen that, but I guess it's out there.
- Kris; but could that be rendered with a simple fn model, and then have style sheets deal with it?
- Eliot; my concern is, if you say 2 footnotes are exactly the same, there's no way to not do that; if what you want is 2 footnotes that happen to have the same text, you're stuck.
- Chris; why would you want that?
- Eliot; if I have 2 chapters, and I want the footnotes to be rendered in both chapters, that'a problem.
- Chris; i believe these were rendered as end notes in the chapter.
- Alan; I often feel like we're drowning ourselves in corner cases... HTML5 doen't have a dedicated footnote mechanism; and somehow the mktg folks are using HTML anyway, so why do we have to provide something HTML doesn't have?
- Carlos; I agree, for many years people have just used span class="footnote" in HTML.
- Kris; I'd send it back to LwD to make the decision, but it seems we have a consensus from TC that TC can't do anything with footnotes in the LwD time frame, so LwD needs to work with 1.3 footnotes.  But we will work on it for 2.0 and keep LwD use cases and issues in mind. 
***ActionItem; Kris will add footnotes to list of stage 1 proposals for 2.0


9.  LwDITA: Issue of MDITA and HDITA validation
        Continue discussion from 8 August 
- Kris; I think we came to the end of the call last week at a point of lights going on in brains about implications for not having easy validation for MDITA and HDITA, and tools building their own validation for those and what it meant for compatibility/interoperabilty.
- Chris; I'm not sure where to begin. since HTML and Markdown are not semantic languages, but presentation markup; it's hard to do stuff with them that's meant for semantic languages.  We have to step back from robust formalism to a more forgiving mindset; allowing for a certain amount of looseness.   Wrt spec language, I'm not sure, but we may just need to say that if you have markup that doesnt conform, processors are free to do what they can.   What we don't want to force is fingerwagging messages for content that looks fine...  The problem is that different vendors will have differing levels of support.  Loosening our grip could lead to interesting results for future design of DITA...
- Kris; and if part of the purpose of LwD is to encourage experimentation in the marketplace, then that's good, but we will still have to make some compatibility statement in the spec.  If we need to touch this topic to avoid misleading folks on interoperability, then we need to discuss it in the CN.
- Chris; I think it's good to put in a note, saying that structures outside these structure guidelines can be supported, but may work differently, or not, in your tool.  But these things must be supported in a tool that claims LwD support.
***ActionItem:  LwD needs to add a note to CN about setting appropriate expectations about compatibility /interop and MDITA/HDITA topics that go beyond what's described in the current docuoment.  Kris will help with this.
- Chris; there are tables giving similar structures in the 3 formats; this explanation should be near that table.
- Kris; a CN is by its nature a non-normative document, so we can't have normative language in it, but can have expectations setting text...


10.  LwDITA committee note
        Where are we? Ready for a DITAweb review?
        Schedule?
        Is there a dependency on the multimedia domain work? 
- Kris; Where are we at with this?  Can we move ahead with the audience being the public?  The release of a formal spec depends on multimedia work, but we shouldn't need that work to put out the CN and get feedback from gen'l public.
- Carlos; We're ready to move to the next stage, but we need to be ready...
- Kris; Chris; do we need to wait for the multimedia domain, or can we go out with the CN without it?
- Chris; If we're pretty sure that what's now in there is what's going to be in there, then we're good, but we need to have the discussion on that.
***AI: for multimedia domain group, make a recommendation about wheter CN needs to hold on completion of multimedia domain work, or whether it can go forward now. 
***ActionItem: LwD SC put together a schedule that includes DITAWeb and a timetable for releasing CN
- Carlos; is DITAWeb review for the TC, to make sure comments got in?
- Kris; yes. 





11:57am ET close 

        
-- Ms. Nancy Harrison

Document Name: DITA TC Meeting Minutes 15 August 2017

---

No description provided.
Download Latest Revision
Public Download Link

---

Submitter: Ms. Nancy Harrison
Group: OASIS Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) TC
Folder: Meeting Notes
Date submitted: 2017-08-16 20:24:53