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Minutes of the OASIS DITA TC
Tuesday, 26 March 2024
Recorded by Hancy Harrison
link to agenda for this meeting:
https://github.com/oasis-tcs/dita/wiki/Previous-agendas
Attendance:
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Robert Anderson, Stan Doherty, Kris Eberlein, Nancy Harrison, Scott Hudson, Bob Johnson, Eliot Kimber, Zoe Lawson, Christina Rothwell, Eric Sirois, Dawn Stevens, Frank Wegmann
Business
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Regrets: Leroy Steinbacher
1. Approve minutes from previous business meeting
19 March 2024 (Harrison, 25 March 2024) (https://groups.oasis-open.org/discussion/dita-tc-meeting-minutes-19-march-2024)
Kris moved, 2nd Scott, approved by TC
2. Announcements
ConVex (https://convex.infomanagementcenter.com/) is scheduled for 8-10 April 2024 in Minneapolis. The call for speakers is closed.
Adobe DITA world (https://2024-adobe-dita-world.meetus.adobeevents.com/) is scheduled for June 11-13 2024. If you are interested in speaking, send an e-mail to techcomm@adobe.com.
Boston DITA Users Group April meeting is scheduled for April X. The meeting link is on the BDUG home page at X.
3. Transition to new OASIS infrastructure: How is it going?
- Add info to your profile, especially a photo or image
- DITA TC e-mail messages with attachments (Eberlein, 25 March 2024) (https://groups.oasis-open.org/discussion/dita-tc-e-mail-messages-with-attachments)
- Kris; the site has real problems; to set up new meetings, I may need to remove entire year to set up new ones. so you may continue to get individual meeting announcements.
- Frank; I didn't get any notices, don't know why.
- Kris; I think they could be a problem; let's try to get you set up. Everyone, please log into new system and add info to your profile or an avatar. also, check settings that relate to privacy and make sure you like them the way they are. When I posted an email with attachments, I got mail asking if I wanted to add things. The site also posts 'related content' that can be as old as 2005, so, not particularly related.
[more discussion of new OASIS site; will continue as necessary]
4. Review A, 2024: Glossentry and elements
- Opening of review (Eberlein, 23 January 2024) (https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/202401/msg00009.html)
- Interim status of review (Eberlein, 30 January 2024) (https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/202401/msg00018.html)
- NEW Final summary of review (Eberlein, 25 March 2024) (https://groups.oasis-open.org/discussion/final-summary-review-a-2024-gloss-entry-topics-and)
- Kris; I closed out everything in web review and sent results to everyone who contributed. 2 attachments (see page) second has all updated content as it exists in github. Robert and I mayhave made some changes to examples
- Robert; about 10% went into changes, but when I removed glossabbrev, I did a search throughout content, so elements that were removed should no longer be in examples, but we don't know if they still make sense... Dawn, please go over them and let us know when they're ready for review. I tweaked topics for which people made comments during the review, so we may have done some of the work you had signed up for, so hope you don't mind, and we definitiely need you to look at it. we had one comment we couldn't handle, see agenda item 5
5. Gloss group topics: Need for new example for the spec
Glossgroup topics: How have you seen them used? (Eberlein, 25 March 2024) (https://groups.oasis-open.org/discussion/glossgroup-topics-how-have-you-seen-them-used)
- Kris; examples shows a glossgroup topic that includes a bunch of other glossgroup topics. It's a common scenario, but has pretty flagrant disregard for translation; can we find another example for the spec? How is it used? Is it ever used in a way it can be translated?
- Eliot; only way it makes sense is if indiv gloss entries are called from a separate map; glossgroup only exists for author convenience, but glossentry order is determened by map, not glossgroup. The only other use is where grouping is by subject area, not alphabetically. At Servicenow, we group gloss entries by subject.
- Kris; best practice is to have separate gloss entries for each term, to enable translation, but glossgroup could aggregate entries by subject, and entries are pulled in by conref.
- Eliot; don't like to use conref, maybe conkeyref...
- Kris; that's how I've seen it done
- Eliot; it would let you see them all in one place.
- Kris; let's look at current example and talk about what we should replace it with.
- Bob; for this, when you translate entries, would need a different order?
- Kris; right.
- Eliot, even worse that that...even if the glossgroup was in the target language, a single letter group could end up being two letter groups, not even a one-to-one correspondence.
Kris; right, this example only works in English, so if there's an L10N req, this just doesn't work. So, is there an example, e.g. with subject grouping, that wouldn't be so problematic?
- Robert; any file like this, that groups things in one file, will be problematic for translation.
- Christine; can we add a note about how problematic this is for translation?
- Frank; is glossgroup supposed to be used like that; to order groups by alphabet?
- Kris; all glossgroup does is let you group multiple glossentry items. this example complicates things by nesting things. a lot of the original use case for glossgroup has been removed by features of modern editors. e.g. in Oxygen, you can set up your editor to show this via editing features.
- Bob; does it serve a purpose going forward? should we remove it?
- Eliot; provides a predefined shell that allows you to nest glossentries within a topic. that's the only argument for keeping it.
- Bob; why would you want that nesting?
- Zoe; I can see it for smaller teams using DITA that aren't trying to solve big problems; being able to have a glossary in one file is much easier; needing a separate topic for each term is hard.
- Dawn; but for that, they can just use a definition list.
- Zoe; I can see your point if someone pointed it out to me; if I'm new and I see a glossary, I'll use it.
- Kris; I think those folks aren't going to be reading the DITA spec for guidance. if we're having a hard time thinking of an example that isn't problematic, maybe we should remove it. though we could group terms by subject. But feels like it's really a stretch.
- Frank; if we agree we would never use it, should we reach out to dita-users to see if anyone out there uses it?
- Kris; that's what we've done for other things like this. Robert; what do you think about removing glossgroup?
- Robert; don't remember exactly; it was an allowance for folks to not make individual gloss files a req. but I'm not inclined to remove it just because of translation.
- Dawn; I tell folks not to use it; not just because of translation, but because there's a better way to do it, use maps.
- Bob; but what value is glossgroup creating that would argue for keeping it?
- Robert; author's with thousands of defs being told to keep them in indiv files wouldn't want to lose it.
- Kris; I was at IBM at that time, if you're used to defining all your glossentries in a single topic, then being told it's 1000 files, it's a problem. But nowadays, that's really ick, we want one per topic with a map. so this looks like an anti-pattern
- Dawn; I have one customer who uses glossgroup; they put all entries directly into it. I still think we should get rid of it.
- Kris; so the choices are: consider removing it from 2.0 as an anti-pattern, or keep it with this example and include a note that it only works in English, or keep it with another example. But I can't see any reason to keep it.
- Dawn; they were very resistant to our recommending not using this. But I don't know if one company resisting is a good enough reason not to do it.
- Zoe; I think I can be convinced to remove it, but it would be nice to have a script to fix things for migration.
- Dawn; completely agree.
- Kris; vote?
- Robert; ambivalent
- Stan; remove
- Kris; abstain
- Scott; ambivalent
- Nancy; remove
- Bob; remove
- Eliot; ambivalent
- Zoe; ambivalent,
- Christina; ask the community to see what resistance would be.
- Eric; leaning toward taking it out
- Dawn; lean towards getting rid of it, some ambivalence, are we trying to recommend best practices or not?
- Frank; ambivalent, if some folks see a compelling reason to keep it, ask around if users see value in it, if not, then might agree to getting rid of it.
[to be continued]
12 noon ET close
ActionItems:
none
fixed to record Scott's vote]
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Nancy Harrison
Principal, Infobridge Solutions
Nancy Harrison (Personal)
Portland OR
978-505-9189
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