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Subject: Announcing the user-assistance-discuss mailing list
Please forward this message to anyone that you think would be interested in discussing the future of Online Help and other User Assistance standards. The User Assistance Discussion List is a place for members of the user assistance and technical communications community to define the requirements for a User Assistance Authoring standard based upon XML. The availability of such a standard could simplify interoperability between authoring, help output and content management systems. The standard would be based upon XML in order to allow content reuse, multi-channel publishing and other forms of single-sourcing. The standard could help to bring some order to the variety of platform-specific and company-specific help formats in existence. The list and its archives are open to everybody. Anyone who wishes to participate may do so by sending a message[1] to user-assistance-discuss-subscribe@lists.oasis-open.org. If consensus around requirements can be achieved then the group would subsequently choose to create an OASIS Technical Committee (TC) to do the actual work of creating a standard. According to OASIS policies, we have 90 days to achieve this consensus. If we cannot achieve consensus in this time frame, or a leadership team does not emerge, then the TC will not be created. Another acceptable result would be a clarification of requirements for incorporation into an existing OASIS standard (like Docbook, DITA or ODF). The sorts of specialized issues that a User Assistance Markup Language would cover are: * callouts and other annotations for screenshots * semantic elements for field definitions * context sensitivity * bidirectional interactions between content and program features Discussion of issues like this will start on May 1st. People who come to the discussion late may catch up by consulting the archives.[2] ==== [1] Additional assistance is available, if needed, via the contacts listed at http://www.oasis-open.org/who/contactus.php [2] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/user-assistance-discuss/
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