Groups - DITA TC Meeting Minutes 19 November 2019 uploaded

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

        Submitter's message
        ActionItems:  
1. Kris will give Carlos a ping wrt stage 2 dates for proposal "Column/row spanning in simpletable"
2. Robert will create a new branch and make the fix for the minor XSD issue that Syncrosoft found.
3. Zoe will work on cleaning up SVN, with guidance from Kris


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Minutes of the OASIS DITA TC
Tuesday, 19 November 2019
Recorded by Hancy Harrison
link to agenda for this meeting:	
https://wiki.OASIS-open.org/dita/PreviousAgendas


Attendance:
Robert Anderson, Deb Bissantz, Bill Burns, Stan Doherty, Kris Eberlein, Nancy Harrison, Scott Hudson, Zoe Lawson, Chris Nitchie, Dawn Stevens, Jim Tivy, Frank Wegmann, Gershon Joseph    


Business
========

1. Roll call
        Regrets:  Carsten Brennecke, Carlos Evia, Eliot Kimber, Eric Sirois    


2. Approve minutes from previous business meeting:
        12 November 2019
            X (Harrison, X November 2019) 


3. Announcements:
Dawn; end of call for speakers at DITA/NA is 12/1, and unlike most years, we may not be extending it this year.
Kris; what is new? What about the 'Journeys' conference?
Dawn; they're 2 separate confs that are co-located.  DITA/NA will be just for DITA presentations, and 'Journeys' is more about content strategy. Up to now we've had one content strategy track at DITA/NA; now extending that, including writing strategies, working in collaboration with other depts, more high-level perspective, with DITA/NA more strategic/technical.  Both will share exhibit space, and keynote speaker (Christina Halverson, author "Content Strategies for the Web Author").


4. Action items
[no updates; see agenda for complete list]


5. DITA 2.0 stage three proposals
        Vote
            Allow example in more places
                https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201910/msg00137.html (Hudson, 29 October 2019) 

Kris moved, 2nd by Bill
Voting results:
yes votes:		9 (Robert Anderson, Deb Bissantz, Bill Burns, Stan Doherty, Kris Eberlein, Nancy Harrison, Zoe Lawson, Dawn Stevens, Eric Sirois)    
no votes:		0


6. Review of DITA 2.0 proposal deadlines
        https://wiki.oasis-open.org/dita/DeadlinesDITA2.0 

Stage two
    (Evia) Column/row spanning in simpletable (https://github.com/oasis-tcs/dita/issues/292)
        /! 22 October 2019 05 November 2019 15 November 2019 ?: Submit to reviewers (Anderson, Kimber) 
***ActionItem:  Kris will give Carlos a ping about dates

Stage three
    (Anderson) Remove domains attribute (https://github.com/oasis-tcs/dita/issues/217)
        /! 22 October 2019 29 October 2019 ?: Send to reviewers (Brennecke, Eberlein, Kimber) 
- Kris; do you have a new date?
- Robert; next week? it keeps taking longer than I hope...
- Kris; what about first TC mtg after Thanksgiving?
- Robert; yes


7. DITA 2.0 stage one proposals
        Diagnostics for Troubleshooting Topic
            https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201911/msg00007.html (Stevens, 08 November 2019)
                https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201911/msg00014.html (Hudson, 12 November 2019)
                https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201911/msg00015.html (Stevens, 12 November 2019) 
- Dawn; idea is to add optional diagnostics section to 1.3 troublehsooting topic. Our clients have commonly had a common challenge; multiple causes for one problem, with difficuly in figuring out which cause is operative.  This is about figuring out how to determine what cause is from a set of multiple possible causes, so they need diagnostics.  Clients have been using a troublesolution section, but that's not optimal, so we want to add a diagnostics element before troublesolution section. Since it needs steps, we suggest a structure like remedy, with steps/stepsinformal.  We originally thought we'd only need one, but talking with Scott, he thought we might need more than one. 
- Scott; I sent to list some scenarios we're running into.  This can become more critical when there's more than one condition, and you have to try different procedures to figure out correct troublesolutions.  We'd also like to reuse steps from another task within this; it would help if we could reuse step within this as well.
- Kris; thoughts? comments? questions?
- Stan; I really support this, Bob Thomas specialized something like this.
- Bill; I  definitely see applications of this in our content.
- Kris; I think this was originally a stage 1 proposal raised by Bob Thomas.  My one concern; we want to keep our troubleshooting topic set up to handle 80% of use cases. I like the idea of diagnostics, but 80% don't need it, don't want to make it too complex.
- Gershon; I agree with that; think we should provide - maybe outside the spec - some specialized DTDs for those who need a more complex solution.
- Dawn; when you say 'complex', is that referring to complexity about what we allow inside the diagnostics section?
- Kris; when I looked at Scott's diagrams, some of them were very complex and overkill.  In 1.3, we had to bend over backwards to make steps available in troubleshooting topic, but I don't know if we tried to make steps available within multiple places within troubleshooting perspective.
- Robert; I dont know, there are elements you can allow in multiple places, but I don't know...
- Scott; I thought it could be similar to the remedy model, but for simpler cases, yu could just use paragraphs.
- Dawn; I thought we could just allow stepsinformal, but that may not make sense to everybody.
- Kris; Dawn needs all input for crafting the proposal, or will Scott co-champion?
- Scott; this is pretty important for us, so I could co-champion.
- Kris; and TC will want to see early examples, because of complexity issues and issues around steps.  Also, it would be great if you could touch base with Bob Thomas, depending on the state of his health.
- Zoe; may be a bit of a sideline, but for lightweight troubleshooting, the examples are intimidating. I don't know if there's the same amt of info out there for breaking down troubleshooting topic and explaining how to use it. [maybe it's out there somewhere?].
- Dawn; Bob wrote a pretty good paper on troubleshooting.
- Kris; right, from Adoption TC; a very good high-level overview of the 1.3 troubleshooting topic.
- Dawn; diagnostics would be an optional element, so those who don't need it wouldn't have to use it.
- Kris; we definitely need diagnostics in troubleshooting, one of the things that led to our decision to separate techcontent from base in 2.0 was that it was impossible to add this kind of element without a whole new release of DITA; if we'd had separation in 1.3, we would have added it to the techcontent package.  One reason for bringing up complexity was IBM's trobleshooting topic, which many thought was too complex. I think we should promote this to stage 2, with a formal champion.
[no objection, done]
- Kris; Bill, can you move this card from stage 1 to stage 2?
- Bill; will do.


8. Likely defect in DITA 1.3 XSD file
        https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201911/msg00006.html (Anderson, 07 November 2019) 
- Robert; not many people use this, but there's a line that's wrong/missing; it was never reported here at OASIS. It's a known defect, but we'll never fix it in 1.3 because it's not worth another errata. We can create a branch with the fix. So for those who ship our grammar files. they'll be able to include it.
- Gershon; does it make sense to send out a note that it's been fixed (basically make it an errata)?
- Kris; we did 2 erratas for 1.3; they're a huge amount of work.
- Robert; this basically is a line in a grammar file that I don't think anyone uses. Think it only came up because Syncrosoft is really complete with their testing.
- Gershon; then I'm good with it.
- Kris; me too; does anyone have any objections to Robert's proposal?
***ActionItem:  Robert will create a new branch and make the fix.



9. Time to disband the Learning and training subcommittee
        https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201910/msg00058.html (Eberlein, 08 October 2019)
            https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201910/msg00118.html (Eberlein, 22 October 2019) 
- Kris; it's past time to do this, we were just waiting for Dawn to be on the call.  We don't need formal roll call vote. I proposae that TC make L&T SC inactive. closed, so no one can join; we'll move L&T code to a Github repository where people can access it.  I move to close the L&T SC, with thanks to Amber and Dawn
- Dawn; second the motion
- Kris; any objections?
[none, approved]
- Kris; will get into setting up the Github [and other] repos, and close OASIS one (hich never really got set up).



10. Time to clean up SVN
        https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201911/msg00012.html (Eberlein, 12 November 2019) 
- Kris; sent out mail last week. We started using svn in 1.2 timefrome, but since we started using Github, the only current material in it some 2.0 work. I propose that we move everything except 2.0 spec work to an archive directory, so people don't find it and think it's current.  Any objections?
[none]
- Kris; any volunteers?
- Zoe; i'll volunteer.
***ActionItem:  Zoe will do this, with guidance from Kris;
- Kris; make sure you're using an SVN client that will let you move things without moving the version history.  And we want a prominent note in new location that these are not current files.


11. DITA: Fifteen(+) years old
        https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201911/msg00019.html (Eberlein, 18 November 2019) 
- Kris; would like feedback from TC members. thinking back to early days. How well has DITA addressed problems it was designed to solve? How has landscape changed? 
- Gershon; still the impression that adopting DITA is complicated and prone to failure, we still have our work cut out on the adoption side. A number of companies have been set up claiming they're easier that DITA, but they just lock you into a proprietary environment.  Also, a number of companies that have adopted DITA are making or thinking of making a move to totally unstructured markup, e.g. sharepoint, confluence. This is an ongoing challenge. When I was on Adoption TC, DITA was new, we were thinking 'how do we get people into DITA?', now, we need to think about 'how do we keep people?'
Kris; one company that markets itself as 'so much easier than DITA' is Madcap Flare
- Robert; We have a lot of DITA, and we couldn't have done the stuff we're doing if it didn't work, we have a combination of stuff that works and doesn't; and DITA can also get used wrong. I'm happy with it or I wouldn't be here.
- Gershon; companies that have adopted it correctly, are mostly wildly successful. If used correctly, nothing comes close. if when used incorrectly, or the expert leaves and company doesn't want to spend money to replace them, that's where there are problems.  I'd see adoption guidance as important. 
- Scott; we were primarily a Frame shop; adoption was a little bit rough, recently had a breakthrough where one writer was using it for 2-3 out of 20 projects, and this year they insisted on converting all their content to DITA; it was a conversion from being one of biggest skeptics, to major convert.  
- Kris; so has DITA solved some of the problems it was meant to solve? re-use? multi-channel publishing? translation? etc.?
- Gershon; yes, when done right; at Cisco, we gave estimates of how many releases it would take to get to ROI, and we usually got ROI at first release.
- Deb; also, the number of tools supporting DITA in last 3-5 years is incredible. CCMS's, authoring tools, big changes to tools space over years; huge hats off to DITA-OT, before that it was very hard to do things from scratch.  Several people have been burned by bad adoptions early on, you really do need a guru who can help.
- Kris; any new problems?
- Stan; with a 15-year-old standard, there's lots of varietion between different tools implementation of which version of DITA.  There's a real issue of 'compliance to which release?'  Also, we now have the  devops environment, some of current lightweight publishing is outside of scope of original DITA; how does devops impact publiching?
- Robert; I like both of those; compliance is tough; there's no easy way to say if a particular tool does it right; we don't have an easy checklist; for devops; a lot of DITA's fancier features are built to enable large scale publishing; designed for a static build.  But devops doesn't work that way; LwD strips out all the things designed for large model publishing.
- Scott; on certification front; Omnis had a list of vendors with compliance certificates; that's an area where we might want to spend more time.
- Kris; we've talked about this many times; but as a TC, we have to stay out of any attempts to certify.  Closest we can come is creating a checklist, for someone else to use.   
- Nancy; I thought it was the adoption TC that would use the checklist
Robert; OASIS would not let a TC, either DITA or adoption, certify vendors.
 



12 noon ET close


        
-- Ms. Nancy Harrison

Document Name: DITA TC Meeting Minutes 19 November 2019

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Submitter: Ms. Nancy Harrison
Group: OASIS Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) TC
Folder: Meeting Notes
Date submitted: 2019-11-22 14:31:43