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Subject: Fwd: Comments on the DITA TC charter
Comments from Gershon and Dawn about the charter Best,
Kris Kristen James Eberlein Chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee OASIS Distinguished Contributor Principal consultant, Eberlein Consulting LLC www.eberleinconsulting.com +1 919 622-1501; kriseberlein (skype) -------- Forwarded Message --------
Thanks Gershon. I have added notes to your
comments and have my own comments below.
My largest comment
is that that the charter intersperses a lot of DITA
definitions and benefits in sections that are titled Purpose
and Scope. I think the Purpose is the purpose of the TC, not
DITA and Scope is the scope of work of the TC not the scope
of DITA. I suggest separating out a section that defines the
standard the TC supports and keeping the Purpose and Scope
clearly focused on why the TC exists (to define and
maintain) and the tasks that we complete (as defined in the
task list). Specifically, I suggest moving and rewriting
everything after the first paragraph in Purpose and
paragraphs 2, 3, and 4 in Scope into a Standard Definition
section. I also think paragraph 5 in Scope (referencing IBM)
should be part of the purpose, not the scope. Other
questions/comments: Does the separation
of base DITA from other specializations of DITA need to be
incorporated into this somehow to establish the scope of
what the committee does? Should
responsibilities of the TC include appointing people as
liaisons to more than just the Adoption TC? Something like,
to form and liaise with subcommittees as needed? We have
liaisons to the lightweight DITA committee for example. We
have had numerous other subcommittees, such as Learning and
Training. It seems that the charter should indicate a more
general statement about our forming, management, and
dissolving of subcommittees. Most charters of
this sort I’m familiar with have a section on membership,
voting rules, etc. Some of that information is covered in
the original call for membership so I suppose technically
through the link it is covered, but would it be harmful to
include it directly? I am interested in
discussing the anticipated audience because I feel that we
often discount the needs of the last bullet when discussing
the spec, its contents, and its organization. From: Gershon Joseph
<gershon@precisioncontent.com> Hi all, Here are my initial thoughts from my review
of the charter: In section “Statement of Purpose” in the
list of items introduced by “More specific semantics allow”, I
wonder if we should add a list item that talks to keys and a
list item that talks to specialization and constraints?
Agree that the list should be
expanded. I would suggest not keys specifically, but
reusability in general (direct and indirect) and I agree
that specialization and constraints should be discussed. My
question, per my first comment, is simply where should this
list go. In the list item introduced by “The work of
this TC will differ from similar efforts such as DocBook
because of” I think we need to rethink this. The second list
item “more specific scope, inasmuch as DITA applies to
topic-oriented information rather than all technical manuals”
is too limiting, no? Why limit ourselves to topic-oriented
information? I’m using DITA at many clients for microcontent
and content models that need not be thought of as topics. In this list, we fail to mention the most
obvious difference between DocBook and DITA. DocBook by design
intends to deliver a content model to be used as-is. If you
modify DocBook, it’s no longer DocBook. On the other hand,
DITA is intended to be modified and not intended to be used
out of the box. Perhaps we should add this in? I agree this is true. I question the
content on a more basic scale – why does it matter how our
work differs from DocBook? Ultimately, I think this relates
to my comment about definitions as well. This is a statement
about how DITA differs from DocBook, not really about the
purpose of the TC itself. In the Scope section, the list item that
says “are optimized for navigation and search” is this still
true? If we want to talk to optimized for search, maybe we
should mention the subject scheme and talk to the rich
taxonomy that adds intelligence to the topics, enabling smart
query and retrieval via for example bots?
Agreed. We do not mention metadata or subject scheme at all
and topics are not inherently optimized without these items,
so the bullet seems to overpromise without some kind of
clarifying statement. This section also talks about “reuse of
community contributions”. We had some in the early days of the
TC, but I don’t think we have any at this time. Is this
statement still valid?
I don’t interpret that this sentence
has anything to do with the TC doing this, but again speaks
to the value of DITA. Again, related to my comment about
definition. In the section “The tasks of the TC
include”: Towards the end of list item 5, we have
this sentence: “The TC anticipates maintaining a set of core
information types of general utility, implemented in schema
languages (such as DTD or XML Schema) selected by the TC.” Why
do we mention that specific schema technologies we support
here? I think we should remove the content in the parentheses.
The standard itself talks to the use of Relax NG as the
normative schema and standard, so I don’t think we need this
here. Plus, we no longer support XML Schema. Agreed. Although the language is “such
as,” the fact that we don’t support XML Schema makes it
misleading. At the very least the example should be RNG and
DTD, but I support removing the parenthetical remark. Note
that this should also come out of the second bullet in the
List of Deliverables as well. I don’t think we’ve ever done anything
that’s mentioned in this list item: Does
the plugin registry (https://github.com/dita-ot/registrycount) toward the public registry of this item?
Or is it not actually TC work since it’s related to the OT?
Doesn’t the Adoption TC answer to the TC and therefore
fulfill the aspect of “suggesting guidelines…” I’m not sure
I agree that we haven’t done these things or even if we
haven’t that they shouldn’t be part of the charter.
Should we delete this item? I don’t think
it’s relevant to the TC based on what we do today.
In section “Anticipated Audience”, there is
an apostrophe missing in the first list item: s/DITAs/DITA’s/ Looking forward to our deeper discussions
on this. Cheers, Gershon Gershon
Joseph | Senior
Information Architect | Precision Content Unlock the Knowledge in
Your Enterprise™
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