Fwd: Comments on the DITA TC charter

Thanks for everybody’s comments so far. I apologize for mine being a bit lengthy and late. I still have the feeling that I haven’t gone as deep as necessary to see exactly what we need to do to make the charter fit for 2022 and beyond. My general impression, also from reading Dawn’s and Gershon’s comments is that we already found some areas that need revision without tearing apart the gist of the charter, which is the purpose and architecture of DITA as originally envisioned. But that could pave the way towards a coordinated revision of the text, identifying the areas for revision and agreeing on contents attributing to the role that DITA plays today. Please find below my more specific comments:

Historical Context

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This is still the original charter to go with creating the DITA TC, as

communicated on March 29, 2004. So, there are some sections that are relevant

only in their historical context and the fact that it was meant to be the

charter of a new group. Like:

- The explicit relation to the DocBook TC:

"The work of this TC will differ from similar efforts such as DocBook

because of

* broader scope, inasmuch as DITA applies to more areas than just

technical manuals

* more specific scope, inasmuch as DITA applies to topic-oriented

information rather than all technical manuals"

The bullet points still hold, of course, but they need no longer be explicitly

related to DocBook.

- Also, this was a worthwile mention at the time of founding the TC:

"This committee builds upon the foundation established by the work of IBM

on DITA."

Not undermining the IBM origins, but DITA is an established technology in its

own right now, and this is a sentence to deserve its place in historical work on

DITA, but no longer is useful after almost 17 years now.

- Actions that were targeted at the future or immediate practice of the

committee work:

"The TC will create specifications for the Darwin Information Typing

Architecture".

No, it's done multiple time. In fact, as later pointed out, it is one of the

foremost tasks of the TC to create and maintain specifications for DITA.

"Within three months of the first meeting, [...]"

Yes, we're past that.

"are optimized for navigation and search"

This is true, but no longer the focus. Mobility is more important (see below), and at that

point I agree with comments by both, Gershon and Dawn.

"may consider the creation of subcommittees [...]"

Been there, happened multiple times. I think, the section on subcommittees needs

to be revised to describe their role nowadays, along with an expectation of the

scope of future SCs.

"Scope of Work"

===============

I think, the basic message is still fully valid, because the DITA architecture is unique

in the XML world, and the concept of information types is as true and important now as it was

in 2004 (or 1998 in the IBM labs...). So is the DITA way of specializing from

the base specification for needs of a certain user community or a single company.

What is missing, of course, is the dimension opened up by mobile devices. Three

years, before smartphones capable of even only displaying any longer chunks of

information arrived (iPhone 2007), nobody could have imagined what we need

documentation now in the mobile era: Transport the right information to the

right person at the right place at the right time. And DITA is a perfect vehicle

to achieve this, because of its architecture and the vast tooling landscape that

simply didn't exist in 2004.

(Because Dawn mentioned it:) Part of (nearly) everybody's toolbox is the DITA-OT. I'm unsure if it needs

inclusion in the TC charter. If you would, you would almost certainly label it

as a reference implementation. Well, de facto it is, but you would elevate it to

being it also de jure, and I'm not sure whether this is also in the interest of

the DITA-OT maintainers. (Then again, I’m not sure if this would have any binding implications

in the OASIS context.)

What is also missing, is drawing a line and taking a stance towards mark*down*

languages of any kind. While DocBook has been a true competitor for the gold

standard in technical documentation at the time, it is worth to mention why DITA

is the current standard in that field compared to Markdown, AsciiDoc, etc.

Thanks,

Frank

irman of the Supervisory Board: Karl-Heinz Streibich - http://www.softwareag.com

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