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Subject: RE: [dita] Update/request from the LwDITA subcommittee
- From: "Michael Priestley" <mpriestl@ca.ibm.com>
- To: Kristen James Eberlein <kris@eberleinconsulting.com>
- Date: Thu, 6 Feb 2020 14:57:24 -0500
I think there are
two issues:
1) A lack of writing
resource on the LWDITA SC at the moment, especially technically focused
writing (making use of conrefs etc.)
2) A tactical
need for an MDITA-focused update, which doesn't need to be a formal spec
but does not need to be updated since what we released in the committee
note.
We haven't produced
new content about MDITA, but there is work happening outside the SC, which
we need to evolve and incorporate. The challenge is how and where to publish
that work. If we go through the spec process for that work, there are two
bottlenecks: our skilled writing resource, and the TC timeline. Alternatively,
it might make sense for us to focus on producing an MDITA-focused committee
note, that addresses our tactical need and bypasses (only for now, and
only for this non-spec deliverable) the spec process we've set up.
Michael Priestley, Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM)
Information Architect, Digital Experience
mpriestl@ca.ibm.com
From:
Kristen
James Eberlein <kris@eberleinconsulting.com>
To:
DITA
TC <dita@lists.oasis-open.org>
Date:
2020/02/06
02:10 PM
Subject:
[EXTERNAL]
Re: [dita] Update/request from the LwDITA subcommittee
Sent
by: <dita@lists.oasis-open.org>
Hey, Carlos.
I think the TC set out reasonable expectations
for XDITA, and I personally did the work (approximately 60+ hours) of implementing
the reuse. I also set up the bookmap for the LwDITA and published the one
and only PDF of the draft LwDITA spec that was posted to Kavi last year.
Has the SC produced any new content about
MDITA? Done any new work on the LwDITA spec? When I look at the GitHub
repository, I see no work has been done since October 2019, and only sparse
work between July (when you and I last worked together) and October 2019.
I honestly can't see what more the DITA
TC can do. Robert Anderson and I, as DITA 2.0 spec editors, set up a regular
monthly meeting with you and Alan Houser (no longer a LwDITA spec editor).
It doesn't look like many (or any?) of our suggestions were attempted,
but our suggested starting point would be the same today: Prototype a few
element-reference topics to see how you can handle HDITA and MDITA considerations.
Developing a specification is hard work,
and unfortunately there is no way to circumvent that.
Best,
Kris
Kristen James Eberlein
Chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
Principal consultant, Eberlein Consulting
www.eberleinconsulting.com
+1 919 622-1501; kriseberlein (skype)
On 2/6/2020 12:23 PM, Carlos Evia wrote:
Dear DITA TC members,
The Lightweight DITA subcommittee is asking its parent organization, the
DITA technical committee, for help.
Simply put, the Lightweight DITA subcommittee does not have the resources
(mostly human) to produce a spec under the workflow set by the TC last
year. That workflow, as some TC members probably remember, requires that
every LwDITA component reference must reuse a majority of its content from
its counterpart topic in the 2.0 spec, including attributes, shortdesc,
usage information, and rendering expectations. While this workflow could
be implemented for XDITA with intense conditional tagging, it creates serious
problems for HDITA and particularly MDITA.
And MDITA is the main reason for the Lightweight DITA spec: there is documented
user demand for an authoritative OASIS-approved document that specifies
mappings of DITA to Markdown. Companies and groups are already using MDITA
in production, and confusion and redundancy are in place because there
is no actual spec, and some are following Jarno's Markdown DITA syntax
reference as that authoritative resource. Others use our committee note
or even my book. Without an OASIS-approved MDITA spec, there's no standard
mapping from DITA to Markdown and users and tool developers have to patch
implementations to accommodate many approaches for doing DITA-like Markdown.
I hope that we can discuss this at a TC meeting and revise or develop a
strategy that allows the Lightweight DITA subcommittee to accomplish its
purpose with OASIS.
Best,
Carlos
--
Carlos Evia, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Communication
Virginia Tech
Blacksburg, VA 24061-0112
(540)200-8201
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