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Minutes of the OASIS DITA TC
Tuesday, 27 May 2025
Recorded by Nancy Harrison
link to agenda for this meeting:
https://github.com/oasis-tcs/dita/wiki/Previous-agendas
Attendance:
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Stan Doherty, Kris Eberlein, Nancy Harrison, Bob Johnson, Eliot Kimber, Zoe Lawson, Christina Rothwell, Leroy Steinbacher
Business
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Regrets: Eric Sirois, Robert Anderson, Scott Hudson, Frank Wegmann, Dawn Stevens
1. Approve minutes from previous business meeting
20 May 2025
https://groups.oasis-open.org/discussion/dita-tc-minutes-20-may-2025-uploaded
Kris moved, 2nd by Christine, approved by TC
2. Announcements
- Leroy, next week is Adobe DitaWorld, virtual, free event
3. Examples for conditional processing
a. Zoe: Flagging
https://groups.oasis-open.org/discussion/conditional-text-example
- Zoe; this is a DITA topic with a task step, with different choices listed with improvement numbers; I've included descriptive text with explanations for tagging. I also included PDF generation, 2 DITAVALs - one for draft one for production - plus PDF produced from for draft and final output.
- Kris; so is this for producing draft output for development team? for version 2.0? version 2.1? or version 2.x?
- Zoe; it's for different versions, but also showing flagging. It's mostly just versioning, with one value excluded, one thing for a future release, one thing that gets excluded. It's both for draft review and what final looks like, using diff DITAVALs, you can get a draft with lots of info, use a differen DITAVAL that gets your final values.
- Eliot; why does excluded stuff not show up in draft?
- Zoe; because it shouldn't show up for a draft current release; it's for a future release.
- Eliot; then maybe we need another DITAVAL to produce future draft; also, in one place you say something will be highlighted blue, other place it's green?
- Zoe; audience is the same, but otherprops value is diff; gray text is there in example for info only.
- Eliot; this is very much like what we do at ServiceNow.
- Christine; this is very helpful; we could use this here; some of our content is over-conditionalized.
- Zoe; I have an excel file that I use XSL on to generate the DITAVAL files.
- Kris; this will be a great example for why people might want to use flagging; I might make it a little bit more simple.
- Zoe; if it would help for me to split this up, into mutiple examples, with more simple flagging, I could make them.
- Kris; I'll see what I can do with that; I'll create an example topic and post it back to the list.
- Kris; in maybe fall 2022, I did a bunch of fiddling with filtering/flagging @s, setting add'l processing @s between DITA spec and LwD spec. I should try to find that; it's another useful flagging example for products that are in alternate releases and delivery channels.
- Zoe; one question, I think that @rev includes change bars, but other flagging @s don't.
- Kris; and your example blurs line a bit between flagging and @rev marking.
- Zoe; but in my world, one product does change bars for all new content. So for something, I don't want to have to flag it two ways. Would be nice to have change bars based on any flagging @, not just @rev; is change bar on @rev based on DITA-OT rather than on DITA itself?
- Kris; rendering change bars is based on DITA-OT, but being able to generate sidebars based on cond. proc would be based on your own XSLT stylesheets.
- Eliot; that's because originally @rev was explicitly not for filtering.
b. Kris: DITAVAL plus subjectScheme
https://groups.oasis-open.org/discussion/conditional-processing-example-ditaval-subjectscheme
- Kris; if you use SS to define roles, and use those in your DITAVAL files, they can be simplified. Any thoughts?
- Eliot; I'm not sure you've made the hierarchy between values, and how the DITAVAL works, completely clear.
- Kris; so more contextual clues about how a processor uses the control values? we do go into that in arch spec.
- Eliot; you say 'if a team wants 5.0', maybe it should say '5.x' instead, but because SS defines hierarchy for 5.x as a hierarchy, so all 5.0/1/2 values are part of 5.x release.
- Kris; I need to include some content about what is needed if you don't use SS. I went thru all the content in arch spec about SS about hierarchy is defined and processed using SS and a DITAVAL file; a table works thru a number of inclusions/exclusions.
- Eliot; I think using the version number is a nice example.
- Nancy; so should this link to the explanation in the arch spec?
- Kris; yes, but maybe just in some places.
- Eliot; in semiconductor world, there's a lot of complexity, and you need complex SS's to use with your SS's. At ServiceNow, we have complex conditions, though not as complex as Zoe's; we tag by date of release, but product itself is released evry 6 months; so main product release is distinct from doc revisions.
- Kris; another thing, for DITA spec, we might be able to simplify our DITAVAL content for our spec review cycles, if we modified in our SS, instead of having a line for each value of @rev, could have a single line.
c. Dawn: Filtering using group syntax [Dawn not on call]
d. Eliot: Using DITAVAL with @outputclass
- Kris; any progress?
- Eliot; not yet, I noticed we could abuse this to get addditional content into your topics.
- Kris; other than the fact that DITAVAL is involved, this is actually using 'flagging' associated with @outputclass, but do we want this example under filtering/flagging, or does it belong somewhere else? That fact is at the heart of my own mental difficulties with that topic.
11:45 am ET close
-- Ms. Nancy Harrison
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Nancy Harrison
Principal, Infobridge Solutions
Nancy Harrison (Personal)
978-505-9189
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