================================================= Minutes of the OASIS DITA TC Tuesday, 23 November 2021 Recorded by Frank Wegmann link to agenda for this meeting: https://wiki.OASIS-open.org/dita/PreviousAgendas Attendance: Robert Anderson, Carsten Brennecke, Kris Eberlein, Carlos Evia, Nancy Harrison, Gershon Joseph, Eliot Kimber, Zoe Lawson, Chris Nitchie, Keith Schengili-Roberts, Eric Sirois, Dawn Stevens, Frank Wegmann, Stan Doherty, Alan Houser, Jim Tivy Business ======== 1. Roll call Regrets: Nancy Harrison 2. Approve minutes from previous business meeting: 16 November 2021 https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/202111/msg00037.html(Harrison, 20 November 2021) Kris moved, 2nd by Gershon, approved by TC 3. Announcements Deadline for submitting to present at ConVEX is 01 December 2021. 4. Action items 16 November 2021: Gershon: Talk to Precision Content dev team about developing tool to generate contains/contains content 5. Review two of element reference topics Status: https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/202111/msg00042.html (Eberlein, 22 November 2021) Kris; Anybody needs more time for this round? Dawn; Yes. Kris; So we keep it open some more days, because of Thanksgiving including the weekend, until Monday the latest. Keith; For strong/em there were a couple in the original proposal. Why are they not present in the spec? Robert; For each element we show one typical example Robert; (summarizing) There were many notes and corrections. As to the anchor and anchorref element: people wonder what does it mean? Background is used for Eclipse infocenters only: an anchor defines a point in the infocenter that other people could use to push their contents to Gershon; Why don't we mention that it is explicitly used for Eclipse? Robert; We did that in the past and there were complaints, so we threw it out. Also, it's not used often anymore. Gershon; Should we pull it from the spec, or deprecate it? Robert; This is always an option, but I know that IBM still uses it. Eliot (talking about a possible use of anchor/anchorref within ServiceNow) Kris; Let's cut it short here; if you want to get out of DITA or deprecate it, please write an email and present it to the TC. Kris (summarizing): many language-related comments Robert; Lots of work in the attributes section of the element reference spec; got a first wider look Kris; cleanup in relationship tables Scott; What about using section element instead of example for examples? Kris; Examples are non-normative text covering an entire section of element references; we use the example element in more and more places Kris; Usually we don't upgrade DITA usage to reflect the latest spec, because people don't always have the environment for the latest spec version available, so we try sticking to elements that we have been using for a long time. Robert; With a standard template in place, we always use the example element. Kris; Any more general feedback or comments? Zoe; It's good to know about the comments in DITAWeb. 6. Review three of element reference topics Notice of review opening: https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/202111/msg00047.html (Eberlein, 23 November 2021) Link for review PDF: https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/document.php?document_id=69345&wg_abbrev=dita Kris; Note that in the email the link to the PDF is wrong, the correct one is the one on the agenda. Because of Thanksgiving this review round lasts two weeks, wrapping it up on Monday, Dec 6. Especially look out for draft comments and the somewhat extensive description of review elements. Note that shortdesc elements use natural language because of its reuse in LwDITA. It is hard to follow comments in DITAWeb itself, so look at the comments in the PDF. Remember that you can compile a PDF yourself: In the annotations pane set the filter options to "All" and click on Report. 7. Review tooling https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/202111/msg00006.html (Eberlein, 02 November 2021) https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/202111/msg00016.html (Hudson, forwarded by Eberlein on 09 November 2021) Kris; Are there any volunteers to pursue this issue? Scott? Anyone else? Scott; Should we talk with Chet [Ensign]? Kris; Not yet, first look at the different options that Oxygen offers. Would it meet our requirements? We could then talk to Chet later on... Scott; What about pulic acessibility? Kris; Scott McGrath at the time asked that when a member clicks on a link for DITAWeb, they should be able to see the content. Eric; That knocked us out as well, our system is not designed that way. Kris; If DITAWeb is failing us, we have to talk to OASIS. ***Action item: Scott to talk to SyncroSoft whether Oxygen could meet all of the TC's requirements. 8. Report about LwDITA subcommittee https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/202111/msg00043.html (Eberlein, 22 November 2021) Kris; I was at the SC meeting yesterday and talked about the conditions on which the SC could continue to exist. A TC voting member must either chair or co-chair the committee, or at least serve as secretary, and who reports to the TC and back from there to the SC. The committee must at least meet once a month. And there must be progress of work. At the time, Bob worked out this arrangement (governance) between the TC and subcommittees. I want to hear back until the end of the calendar year if someone takes a leadership position in the SC, who is a voting member. Alan, Frank, you were both on the call. Any comments? Frank; Kris, it's good that you took part in the meeting to lay out all the options on the table and report about the current state of affairs. Especially since some in the SC didn't really know what's going on now that Carlos is gone. Also, I learned about the governance document the first time, so it's pretty clear what the TC expectations are. Alan; Kris, Frank, you summarized it pretty well, I have nothing to add. 9. Use of the term "pseudo-topic" https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/202111/msg00050.html (Eberlein, 23 November 2021) Kris (presented the case of the word "pseudo-topic" in the titlealt topic); Is there a wording that could replace it, and, if not, come up with a definition? Chris; Oh, that is my fault. "Generated topic" would be just okay. Kris; Fine. 10. Spec's alternative purpose https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/202111/msg00041.html (Lawson, 22 November 2021) https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/202111/msg00044.html (Eberlein, 23 November 2021) Zoe; At the time of DITA 1.0, I didn't really know what's going on. Yes, the spec contains specific language and technical stuff, but it's more than that: I used it as a user guide. It's the document where you go to, so the spec is kind of a user guide, and so this document could include more writer-friendly stuff. Kris; Our primary audience are people who implement DITA applications. Only our secondary audience are information architects and writers. We are aware that short descriptions appear as tooltip in tools like Oxygen. But we can't make a spec to work as a user guide. In an ideal world, if we had the resources, we could provide a tutorial about how to use DITA, which would be approved by the TC. Frank; Actually, it's kind of a compliment when a spec is used as a user guide. Specs often improve over time and becomre more accessible to users, but the primary audience are implementors. Kris; I must say that I haven't used the spec, before I joined the TC. Zoe; There's an abstract and there's short descriptions, and you can put multiple short descriptions into an abstract. There are about seven different ways to do anything. It's best one sticks to the local implementation of DITA and how writers use it. Kris; We try to describe the most typical usage in the spec. Also, you could take the example descriptions and put them directly in the description of your local implementation. 12 noon ET close