Announcing the user-assistance-discuss mailing list

["Paul Prescod" <paul.prescod@xmetal.com>]

Please forward this message to anyone that you think would be interested
in discussing the future of Online Help and other User Assistance
standards.

The User Assistance Discussion List is a place for members of the user
assistance and technical communications community to define the
requirements for a User Assistance Authoring standard based upon XML.
The availability of such a standard could simplify interoperability
between authoring, help output and content management systems. The
standard would be based upon XML in order to allow content reuse,
multi-channel publishing and other forms of single-sourcing. The
standard could help to bring some order to the variety of
platform-specific and company-specific help formats in existence.

The list and its archives are open to everybody. Anyone who wishes to
participate may do so by sending a message[1] to
user-assistance-discuss-subscribe@lists.oasis-open.org.

If consensus around requirements can be achieved then the group would
subsequently choose to create an OASIS Technical Committee (TC) to do
the actual work of creating a standard. According to OASIS policies, we
have 90 days to achieve this consensus. If we cannot achieve consensus
in this time frame, or a leadership team does not emerge, then the TC
will not be created. Another acceptable result would be a clarification
of requirements for incorporation into an existing OASIS standard (like
Docbook, DITA or ODF).

The sorts of specialized issues that a User Assistance Markup Language
would cover are:

* callouts and other annotations for screenshots
* semantic elements for field definitions
* context sensitivity
* bidirectional interactions between content and program features

Discussion of issues like this will start on May 1st. People who come to
the discussion late may catch up by consulting the archives.[2]

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[1] Additional assistance is available, if needed, via the contacts
listed at http://www.oasis-open.org/who/contactus.php

[2] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/user-assistance-discuss/