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Subject: Re: [dita] index terms
Chris Wong wrote: > My point is that we cannot assume DITA adopters will not be > print-centric, nor can we tell print-centric users to bugger off. I think this is the disconnect: DITA is explicitly *not* print centric. It was originally designed to do things that *were not books* and what facilities it has for doing book-type deliverables are, while not an afterthought, definitely not the primary focus of its design. What I'm saying is that some users of DITA may have made a suboptimal technology choice if sophisticated book-centric publishing is a primary requirement. That's just a fact and their inappropriate choice doesn't necessarily obligate us, as a standards development body, to reorder our priorities. As a standards development body, just like any other development group, we have to carefully manage the scope of what we're doing. DITA has clearly defined, from the beginning, that sophisticated book publishing is outside its scope. To the degree that holding that line means telling some users to "bugger off" then we have to do that. DITA can't be all things to all users. DITA will always be under presure to add features that are outside of its scope. Sometimes we have to make hard decisions about what to take on and what not to take on. But at the same time, DITA can be extended unilaterally and I think that sophisticated indexing is exactly the place to take advantage of that. If there is a community of DITA users who really need more indexing than DITA can easily provide with a minimum of design effort, that community can drive its own development activity, whether its within a single enterprise or an ad-hoc collaborative effort: i.e., start a project on Source Forge. In the case of Idiom as a business, a business that is explicitly selling DITA-based solutions (see www.idiominc.com), I see an opportunity to offer additional value by providing a well-architected indexing solution on top of core DITA. But just because a company like Idiom or Innodata Isogen, both companies that try to sell DITA-based products and services, have customers that have requirements that DITA doesn't currently meet doesn't necessarily mean that those features have to go into the core DITA design. Precisely because of DITA's inherent extensibility we, as a marketplace, can offer value-added solutions, some of which might eventually become part of core DITA, some of which might not. Sophisticated indexing is just one example of a requirement that core DITA will not ever satisfy. But DITA provides a built-in mechanism for those requirements to be satisfied by third parties in an architected way. Cheers, Eliot -- W. Eliot Kimber Professional Services Innodata Isogen 9390 Research Blvd, #410 Austin, TX 78759 (512) 372-8841 ekimber@innodata-isogen.com www.innodata-isogen.com
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