Great job! Thanks, Keith.
I'd like to ask for one correction:
Current: "Kris registered misgivings, saying that this approach
swaps one level of complexity (i.e. creating specializations) by
adding new elements for the new template types."
Suggested revision: "Kris registered misgivings, saying that this
approach swaps one level of complexity (creating specializations)
for the potential complexity of having an infinite number of
different specialized elements for the same semantic."
Best,
Kris
Kristen James Eberlein
Chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
Principal consultant, Eberlein Consulting
www.eberleinconsulting.com
+1 919 682-2290; kriseberlein (skype)
On 10/30/2016 10:02 PM, Keith
Schengili-Roberts wrote:
=================================================
Minutes of the OASIS Lightweight DITA SC
Monday, 17 October 2016
Recorded by Keith Schengili-Roberts
In attendance: Stanley Doherty, Kristen Eberlein, Carlos
Evia, Mark Giffin, Scott Hudson, John Hunt, Jonathan
Piasecki, Michael Priestley, Keith Schengili-Roberts, Birgit
Strackenbrock
Regrets: Rahel Bailie, Tim Grantham
== Status Updates ==
Reporting on the discussions relating to how sub-committees
should work with the parent committee Kris said that the TC
has had interesting discussions on this topic and are
continuing to revise a topic relating to the interactions
between the two groups.
Tim was not present, so no report on LwDITA schema
generation from templates.
Carlos was hoping to have a meeting with Kris to further
examine the template he drafted for the LwDITA
specification. A power outage prevented the original meeting
time from happening; plan is for it to be rescheduled prior
to next SC meeting.
== Marketing Specialization Discussion ==
Marketing specialization template draft devised by Birgit,
and was circulated to the group the previous week for
review/discussion for this meeting.
Some highlights of draft marketing template:
- in the draft, topic element specialized to become
marketingtopic
- specmeta element is the parent of four elements
specialized from ph: brand, category, product and company
- body element specialized to marketingbody
- section element specialized to marketingsection, which can
contain any sequence of: features, specifications (both
specialized from dl), highlights (specialized from ul),
action (specialized from p) and quote (specialized from
fig).
- another section element specialization called
legalsection, which can contain a disclaimer (specialized
from fig), copyright (specialized from p), plus
copyrightyear and copyrightholder (specialized from ph)
- a third section element specialization called contact,
containing company, contactperson, address, phonenumber,
email, website and addinfo elements (all specialized from p)
Michael commented that if we were working in full DITA
the sections defined in the draft template would actually be
using sectiondiv element instead, but this would introduce
another layer that LwDITA currently does not implement. One
possible solution for this that Michael pointed out was that
if you have a specialization model where inherit is used and
you have specialized elements inside it, it would inherit
the parent model but replace any base instances with the
specialized instances.
Kris asked if someone from the SC could talk about this
example template at the next TC meeting to show were the SC
is going with the template approach. Mark volunteered to do
this, and Kris said she would add the item to the TC agenda.
Birgit mentioned that she had made some minor changes to the
template based on initial feedback, and promised to pass
them along to Mark.
Responding to a query from Kris relating to section-level
specialization, Michael responded that that idea of
section-only specialization had been dropped a while ago.
This is covered in his DITA North America 2016 presentation.
Since specializing regular DITA is not an easy thing to do,
the LwDITA approach is instead to create templates for what
otherwise might be candidates for specialization (the
marketing template being a good example of this). Kris
registered misgivings, saying that this approach swaps one
level of complexity (i.e. creating specializations) by
adding new elements for the new template types. Mark pointed
out that this approach is fundamentally different from
regular DITA, and may be a consideration for DITA 2.0.
== Authoring a Committee Note about LwDITA ==
Kris asked the SC to think about authoring a committee note
about the need for LwDITA, what elements are involved,
tooling support, audiences, etc. She thought that this would
be less onerous than drafting a full specification, and that
it would be good practice prior to drafting a full
specialization.
Carlos agreed to lead effort the effort on this starting
in early November, along with help from Keith.
== LwDITA Schedule for 2017 ==
Kris also asked if a straw-man schedule for LwDITA's
milestones for 2017 could be assembled. Michael agreed that
this would be a good idea, commenting that once the SC has
worked out bugs from Tim's draft DTD we have the foundation
necessary to begin pulling together a draft specification.
== Preliminary Results from LwDITA Poll ==
In response to the ongoing discussion relating to
specialization, Carlos reported that the responses to the
question "What is the main feature of LwDITA that you are
excited about?" the responses are currently:
- 80% simplified XML authoring
- 64% cross-silo content sharing
- 60% HTML5 authoring
- 48% Markdown authoring
- 20% easier specialization
Michael explained the relatively low rates for
specialization to the fact that it is hard to do in regular
DITA, and therefore its benefits are not top of mind with
those who are polled.
Carlos plans to share the full results from the poll with
the community later this week.
== DTDs to RNGs? ==
Since Tim has redone the LwDITA DTDs over into RNG, Mark
suggested that we move the official work over to RNG.
Michael liked idea, suggested we get a second set of eyes to
review Tim's efforts. Mark said he would get in touch with
Eliot Kimber about this.
Meeting concluded at 2:01pm EST.
-
Keith
Schengili-Roberts
Market Researcher and
DITA Evangelist
IXIASOFT
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