dita-lightweight-dita — archive

[Jim Tivy]

Hi Folks I am CTO at Bluestream makers of XDocs (DITA CMS) and I participate on the product planning committee here at Bluestream. My background is in data modeling and database internals. In early 2000 we wrote an XML database and I was involved with the XQuery working group then. My involvement with docs started when I worked on a publish engine in the early 80s. My interest in lightweight dita revolves around: - requirements for simplicity from non tech pubs authors. - demand for simpler web based editors. - the round trip problem. To what extent can you allow editing of full marked up tech pubs DITA in a less involved environment. - some common themes I track like - what makes something simple or "easy" is also applicable. - Some of our customers say "give us Word like UX" - but office xml has a 5000 page spec. So the spec is not simple, but the user experience is - according to customers. Sometimes I think the idea of lightweight DITA is not workable - but I think we do need to look at this. cheers Jim