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OASIS DITA Technical Committee Minutes
Tuesday, 5 May 2009
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Minutes recorded by Kristen James Eberlein.
1. ROLL CALL
Regrets from Robert Anderson, Stan Doherty, Su-Laine Yeo, Elliot Kimber,
and JoAnn Hackos.
Quorum is present.
2. APPROVE MINUTES FROM PREVIOUS MEETING
* http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/200904/msg00093.html (21 April
2009--updated)
Motion made to approve minutes; seconded by Michael Priestley; motion
carried by acclamation.
3. SUBCOMMITTEE REPORTS
Jae Sheddy reported on the work of the OASIS DITA Semiconductor Information
Design Subcommittee. Work on documenting the specialization is currently
stalled, as committee members are busy with their day jobs. Freescale is
already using the specialization in conjunction with IP exact (XX); they
will demonstrate it as soon as their product is publically released. They
have been able to auto-generate register tables and are working on writing
the language specification for the specialization (which is DITA
1.1-based.) LSI is working on upgrading to DITA 1.1.
Steffen Frederiksen reported that he has been working with people from the
pharmaceutical industry; he will be proposing a subcommittee later this
month.
Action (5 May): Don Day to line up a report from the Enterprise Business
Document Subcommittee for next week.
4. ITEM: CROSS-REFERENCES TO TOPICHEADS AND IMPLICT TITLE-ONLY TOPICS
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/200901/msg00039.html (Eliot,
others)
Action (21 April): Michael to respond to Eliot; Eliot to send a proposal
to the list.
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/200905/msg00003.html (proposal
for vote)
Paul Grosso stated that he wants more time to consider Elliot Kimbers
e-mail, since it looks as if Elliots proposal involves changes to DITA 1.2
in areas where the TC had agreed not to make changes. Michael Priestley
stated that he thinks that no changes are suggested for 1.2; the wording
changes proposed are clarifying the status quo by stating clearly that
cross references to topicref elements are not clearly defined and so are
processor dependent.
Michael reported that he and Elliot wrestled with the issue and arrived at
an OK accommodation. The clarifications that Elliot wanted make clear that
the behavior of an xref to a topicref is undefined; they include adding
language to the specifications to clearly state this. They discussed two
scenarios:
1) Treat it as a reference to the topicref, if the map becomes an
addressable, targetable artifact on output
2) Treat it as an indirection if there is no artifact generated on output
Since the creation of an artifact is dependent on target media, it doesnt
make sense to specify how the xref should behave, other than to state that
it could be treated either way.
They also agreed to clarify the following points:
1) If one refers to a topicref by href, that actually is a reference to the
topicref.
2) If you refer to a topicref by keyref, that actually is a reference to
the thing that the topicref is addressing.
This is true even when you have a topicref with both an ID and keys
defined.
Elliot reviewed the language spec and identified places where he thought
wording changes would be needed to clarify these two points. In the process
of reviewing all the href content, he also found a few places where
behavior is not spelled out.
Don Day interjected that he thought many of Elliots comments should be
treated as general documentation comments that came out of a technical
analysis.
Paul Grosso stated that he thinks it is unclear what is proposed for the
basis of a vote.
Don stated that he thought that the documentation issues should be noted by
the editors of the specifications and added to comments that are currently
under inspection.
Michael stated that he thought the TC was not ready to vote on the issue,
that there is enough detail that people need more time to consider it
before voting.
Paul raised the point that the subject line mentions implicit title-only
topics, but that on quickly scanning the e-mail he did not see any
reference to such.
Michael commented that the issue had earlier been split in two, with the
decision that title-only topics did not need resolution, since you can get
the desired effect by using the chunk and copy-to attributes. The issue
left is how cross references to topichead elements behave.
Action: TC members to look at the e-mail and consider both major point and
suggestions for documentation changes. Need to make sure that both specs
incorporate these changes appropriately.
5. ITEM: MAPREF ATTRIBUTE RESOLUTION
How does @scope behave when cascading from map to map?
Action (21 April): Robert to write up summary based on 21 April
discussions; vote when it is posted.
Deferred; left as an open action for Robert Anderson.
6. ITEM: EDITORIAL STYLE
Action: Gershon Joseph will follow through on this by setting up the
sign-up page.
Gershon reported that this was still open and that Kris Eberlein had
volunteered to help; he expects for this to be handled this week.
7. ITEM: THE CASE FOR AGGREGATED EDITING
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/200903/msg00014.html
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/200904/msg00099.html (TSelf
comment)
Deferred until Steve Manning is present. Members should read Tony Selfs
comment.
8. ITEM: PROPOSAL FOR NEW TECH COMM SUBCOMMITTEE
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/200904/msg00002.html
JoAnn hosted a round table at CMS/DITA NA 2009, and the proposal was
announced several times. Gershon reported that the round table was not well
attended since other meetings are going on. Most people said it was great
idea, although fewer people stated that they will join OASIS and actively
support the subcommittee. They are still looking for more people to
participate, although there is a big enough core of people from the DITA TC
and Adoption TC to move forward. JoAnn is planning to send e-mail to her
mailing lists. Gershon will start writing a charter. Gershon stated that he
planned to send an e-mail to Cisco people, and asked that folks on the call
consider similarly contacting their constituencies about participation on
the Tech Comm subcommittee. Don and Michael agreed that they should contact
councils within IBM.
Don asked for other information about the CMS/DITA conference. Gershon
reported that Kris Eberlein and JoAnn Hackos moderated a panel about DITA
1.2 that included Michael Priestley and several other TC members; the panel
aroused tremendous interest. Michael further commented that prior to the
panel, many people had told him that the 1.2 panel was what they were most
interested in. When Kris Eberlein asked who in the audience was using DITA,
maybe 150 audience members raised their hands. DITA users are interested,
passionate, and driving this stuff forward.
Michael also reported that a proposal for a new subcommittee on mashups
emerged. There were several sessions about combining DITA content with
standardized data sources, including a presentations by Seth Park (?
standard) and Hal Trent (retail catalogues with part descriptions, part
numbers, and prices). Seth proposed a subcommittee and there was immediate
interest. The idea would be to standardize mechanisms for explicitly
combining human-readable content and data sources in a way that can provide
a common base for infrastructure across industry-specific extensions.
8. NEW ITEM: ELEMENT-TO-ELEMENT RELATIONSHIP TABLES (EXTERNAL
LINKS)-Element Relationship Tables
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/200905/msg00000.html (Kimber)
Action (5 May 2009): Gershon Joseph to log the item in the DITA 1.3 issues
list.
9. NEW ITEM: WHAT SHOULD BE IN THE ARCHITECTURAL SPECIFICATION? (Eberlein)
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/200905/msg00001.html
10. New ITEM: Specialization spec packaging (Kravogel via Gershon)
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/200904/msg00075.html
Kris Eberlein stated that she would find clarification about what should be
in the architectural spec helpful. Currently, the text of the architectural
spec contains more information about what purposes the document is NOT
intended to serve than any content that clearly specifies the charter of
the document. There is overlap between language spec and architectural spec
also.
Chris Kravogel stated that this is a hot issue for the Machine Industry
subcommittee also. He suggested combining discussion of the agenda item
concerning specialization spec packaging here also. Kris Eberlein stated
that as the number of specifications grow, we need a clear idea of what
they should contain
Don Day raised the concern that we are behind schedule on DITA 1.2, and
that there is significant interest in the release.
Gershon stated that he thought that Jeffs rework of the TOC had removed
some duplication; also, that there was other material (minimalism,
information mapping) that could be removed from the base architectural
specification. Michael and Kris stated that they thought such information
should find a home in the documentation for the Technical Content package,
along with material about concept, task, reference, glossary, etc.
Chris Kravogel mentioned that the Machine Industry subcommittee has
developed several specializations for DITA 1.2: hazard statement domain
(part of base package), task requirements domain (technical content
package), and the machinery task specialization (machine industry package).
The subcommittee thinks that they need to other guidance to people about
how to implement these domains but are not sure WHERE they have to deliver
WHAT information.
Michael Priestley noted that the machinery task specialization was now part
of the technical content package, so that they subcommittee only needs to
deal with two destinations. He reminded us that we needed specifications
for the three packages (base, technical content, and learning & training),
not for each DTD. He suggested the following content for the packages:
o Base: Topic, map, utility and map group domains, hazard statement
o Technical content: Minimalism, topic orientation, concept, reference,
three tasks (general task, constrained task, and machine task)
o Learning and training: Its own content
Action (5 May 2009): Gershon to update the doctype shells page with feed
back from Michael, also to 1) add heading styles to make the collection
headings clearer, and 2) clarify expectations for the various spec
documents. Gershon and Michael will include Robert Anderson and Jeff Ogden,
since they were involved in the last changes to the page. Michael Priestley
will draft a clear, crisp definition of the charter of the architectural
spec; he also will draft a one-paragraph description of each document,
including the architectural spec.
Meeting adjourned.
-- Kristen Eberlein
The document named DITA TC minutes, 5 May 2009
(DITA_TC_meeting_5_May_2009.txt) has been submitted by Kristen Eberlein to
the OASIS Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) TC document
repository.
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