Lightweight DITA SC

Hi Carlos, all, After yesterday's meeting, I took a closer look to WD 06.  Although I am very in-experienced in writing this kind of papers, I have some remarks / additions, please feel free to use them to your liking. -- 2. Why Lightweight DITA? A suggested answer to  John Hunt's questions: " The high-level features for which DITA is praised are: semantic tagging, chunking of content into topics, content re-use at various levels, options for conditional publishing. LwDita offers these features as well. But where full DITA contains many features (elements, attributes) which are specific for a broad range of use-cases, LwDITA deliberately limits itself  to generically useable constructs. This results in a much "smaller standard", in terms of elements, attributes and complexity. This pragmatism has two results. For individuals, learning how to use the standard in a sensible way, will be much easier. Lightweight DITA is expected to allow the use of more generic authoring and storage tooling than full-DITA. For organizations, implementing LwDITA will involve much less change-management effort and lower costs on ICT than full DITA does require.  The choices that kept the LwDITA standard lightweight, logically mean that LwDITA has functional limitations compared to full DITA. For organizations who -after having gained experience with structured content authoring- need more features, LwDITA can serve as a good start to evolve to full DITA as it is as much 'upwards compatible' as possible. " 2.2 Support for non-XML formats "LwDITA adds support for structured authoring in HTML5 and Markdown" -->   My question: Only in authoring or also in storage (and publishing for that matter?). Question also relates to 4.2.x 3.2 Stricter content model Would it be useful to add / replace "No mixed content" to/as the title (" Stricter content model: no mixed content" ) , as this is the essence of LwDITA's "Stricter content model" (if I am right)?   5. Tools We intend to provide a free-of-charge Cloud LwDITA instance of FontoXML - as a Service for at least the first half year after LwDITA is introduced. It will use GoogleDrive and OneDrive as a repository, hence allowing small teams to work together. It will not require any installation of tools. It will work very comparable to http://dita.fontoxml.com does already.  Can you mention this in this paragraph? ---  Please let me know if you need me to put this kind of suggestions into the doc itself instead of as a separate mail. Hope it is helpful!  Cheers, Jan Jan Benedictus - CEO t   +31 70 3191923      ·    m   +31 6 144 82 303 e   team@fontoXML.com      ·    w   FontoXML.com                    s   LinkedIn      ·    s   Twitter

Hi Jan, Thanks for the comments! I had one response below. On 2/7/2017 3:20 AM, FontoXML - Jan Benedictus wrote: 2.2 Support for non-XML formats LwDITA adds support for structured authoring in HTML5 and Markdown -->   My question: Only in authoring or also in storage (and publishing for that matter?). Question also relates to 4.2.x The subcommittee has not discussed storage of lwdita topics, that I can recall. I assume it is completely open to any way someone might want to store the topics: in a source control system like GitHub, Subversion, Perforce, etc.; or in a CCMS or just about anything else. The standard will not cover this. The same goes for publishing. Because lwdita will be based on full DITA, it should be easy to use lwdita topics and maps in existing DITA publishing tooling. There is already a Markdown plugin that enables you to use md topics with the DITA Open Toolkit. In some cases you might have to do some conversion of lwdita to get it into XML format to access existing tooling, but it should be easy to do that. You should also be able to do things like publish your MDITA topics with a static site generator like Jekyll, without much trouble. The standard will not cover this. Mark Giffin Mark Giffin Consulting, Inc. http://markgiffin.com/

Hi Mark, Thanks for your reply there. Just to clarify how I got to my question:  I assumed -like you are stating-  that the standard does not favour the kind of system to store in. But it struck me that the text is explicitly mentioning that " LwDITA adds Markdown and HTML * for authoring*  ", which may be understood that it does not allow (of favour) to store in topics in either .md or .html ?  Jan   Jan Benedictus - CEO t   +31 70 3191923      ·    m   +31 6 144 82 303 e   team@fontoXML.com      ·    w   FontoXML.com                    s   LinkedIn      ·    s   Twitter 2017-02-08 5:37 GMT+01:00 Mark Giffin < mark@markgiffin.com > : Hi Jan, Thanks for the comments! I had one response below. On 2/7/2017 3:20 AM, FontoXML - Jan Benedictus wrote: 2.2 Support for non-XML formats "LwDITA adds support for structured authoring in HTML5 and Markdown" -->   My question: Only in authoring or also in storage (and publishing for that matter?). Question also relates to 4.2.x The subcommittee has not discussed storage of lwdita topics, that I can recall. I assume it is completely open to any way someone might want to store the topics: in a source control system like GitHub, Subversion, Perforce, etc.; or in a CCMS or just about anything else. The standard will not cover this. The same goes for publishing. Because lwdita will be based on full DITA, it should be easy to use lwdita topics and maps in existing DITA publishing tooling. There is already a Markdown plugin that enables you to use md topics with the DITA Open Toolkit. In some cases you might have to do some conversion of lwdita to get it into XML format to access existing tooling, but it should be easy to do that. You should also be able to do things like publish your MDITA topics with a static site generator like Jekyll, without much trouble. The standard will not cover this. Mark Giffin Mark Giffin Consulting, Inc. http://markgiffin.com/

Dear Jan, We decided, during Monday's call, that the focus of this first committee note would be "LwDITA for authoring." So I guess that's our objective. Best, Carlos --  Carlos Evia, Ph.D. Director of Professional and Technical Writing Associate Professor of Technical Communication Department of English Center for Human-Computer Interaction Virginia Tech Blacksburg, VA 24061-0112 (540)200-8201 On Wed, Feb 8, 2017 at 11:07 AM, FontoXML - Jan Benedictus < jan.benedictus@fontoxml.com > wrote: Hi Mark, Thanks for your reply there. Just to clarify how I got to my question:  I assumed -like you are stating-  that the standard does not favour the kind of system to store in. But it struck me that the text is explicitly mentioning that " LwDITA adds Markdown and HTML * for authoring*  ", which may be understood that it does not allow (of favour) to store in topics in either .md or .html ?  Jan   Jan Benedictus - CEO t   +31 70 3191923      ·    m   +31 6 144 82 303 e   team@fontoXML.com      ·    w   FontoXML.com                    s   LinkedIn      ·    s   Twitter 2017-02-08 5:37 GMT+01:00 Mark Giffin < mark@markgiffin.com > : Hi Jan, Thanks for the comments! I had one response below. On 2/7/2017 3:20 AM, FontoXML - Jan Benedictus wrote: 2.2 Support for non-XML formats "LwDITA adds support for structured authoring in HTML5 and Markdown" -->   My question: Only in authoring or also in storage (and publishing for that matter?). Question also relates to 4.2.x The subcommittee has not discussed storage of lwdita topics, that I can recall. I assume it is completely open to any way someone might want to store the topics: in a source control system like GitHub, Subversion, Perforce, etc.; or in a CCMS or just about anything else. The standard will not cover this. The same goes for publishing. Because lwdita will be based on full DITA, it should be easy to use lwdita topics and maps in existing DITA publishing tooling. There is already a Markdown plugin that enables you to use md topics with the DITA Open Toolkit. In some cases you might have to do some conversion of lwdita to get it into XML format to access existing tooling, but it should be easy to do that. You should also be able to do things like publish your MDITA topics with a static site generator like Jekyll, without much trouble. The standard will not cover this. Mark Giffin Mark Giffin Consulting, Inc. http://markgiffin.com/