Meeting Minutes 7/06/2004 -- DITA Technical Committee

Title: Meeting Minutes 7/06/2004 -- DITA Technical Committee 

Agenda:

1. Roll call

Voting Members: Indi Liepa, Eliot Kimber, Robin Cover, Mike Wethington, David Schell, Paul Grosso, Michael Priestley, France Baril (scribe), Don Day

Observers: Christopher Kreiler, Deborah Lepeyre, Erik Hennum, Eric Sirois

No quorum

2. Review/approve minutes from 29 June

http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/200406/msg00070.html

Not approved, because we didn’t have quorum.

3. Progress on issues currently in discussion:

- Conref and XInclude? (Plan for now: explain & contrast with SGML conref)

TODO : Michael to look if contrasts with SGML.

TODO : Eric Hennum to wrap up his thoughts and put them on the list.

Eliot talked about his experience with Xiruss-t (project site is

http://xiruss-t.sourceforge.net).

He wrote a paper for XML Europe where he talks about basic

challenges in Content Management functionality for XML based tech

doc. He says there is no complete solution at this point that are

completely acceptable. He makes a demonstration on managing

hyperdocuments, talks about Xinclude and conref. The code is

available on sourceforge, not for production use, but educational.

The papers demonstrates the basic fact that most of the pain is at

the boundary where the import/export process takes place. He

developed a generic import framework to work with compound

documents. People should be able to download it from the sourceforge website.

Don asked if it is possible to make a bin package for downloading

Eliot to look at license issue and see what he can do. He doesn’t

want people to use it for production.

Discussions about: would we want to provide DITA toolkit as open source?

The Issue of licensing with open source came out.

The idea of having an IBM statement of self interest in making DITA

public to answer questions in the industry about wanting to force

this DITA std on others.

Michael asked others to bring up the business value of DITA for them

or their organization. Michael to post this question on the list to

invite others to comment on the issue.

Indi has information for business case that she can share.

- Namespace for DITA?

Eliot has demonstrated that he can add namespaces into schema and

operate on it. He created 2 ns, one for maps and one for topics. He

had to modify the xslt processor so that all maps statement referred

to the class attribute and made sure all templates matched on *

instead of on element names. XSLTs were already using * matches at

98%. There is nothing more to it.

Corresponding change on document: add the namespace declaration.

Because dita namespace become root namespace so no implication for

other changes.

Paul Grosso: supporting namespaces does not bring extra problems to vendors.

Why need to have namespaces?

Eliot: Always was a problem in SGML. There was

no way to say unambiguiously this document relates to this set of

rules. XML still had the same problem. You could guess with doctype

declaration. With namespaces and schema we have a way to make

unambiguous info. Schema spec gives syntactically distinct mechanism

to map to a namespace. You have to be able to do that to develop

generic processes.

Don other benefit: gives DITA content possibility to compound with

other document types. Michael: also with namespaces you can use

elements from 2 different specializations for companies that use

the same element name in different ways within the same tree.

Issue: we need to know how many namespaces we are going to need. We

need to determine what names we need.

Each basic topic type from DITA will have its own namespace.

Specialization from other companies will be develop in these

companies namespaces.

- Which version of CALS table model?

Not discussed.

- Are the current domains adequate?

Not discussed.

4. Continue working on outlines for the initial specifications:

- Guidance from Michael and JoAnn? Latest outline still is this:

http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/200406/msg00035.html

- Report from Eliot on substructure conventions? Specs we should emulate?

- DITA Map/task map for the spec documents?

Not discussed.

5. AOB?

Nothing new.

ACTIONS:

Don encouraged using the mailing list this week to drive progress

on the discussion issues, particularly to understand the full set

of namespaces we should declare for DITA.

Action: Eliot to wrap up the "set of namespaces" as a proposal for the

TC to approve next week.

Action: All, contribute to Michael Priestley's posted question on

"What is the business value of DITA?"

http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/200407/msg00003.html

France Baril

Documentation architect/Architecte documentaire

I X I A S O F T

+1 514 279-4942



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