Minutes from Feb 23th 2015

Lightweight DITA

23 Feb 2015

Assignment of minutes: Scott Hudson

Roll call:

Michael Priestly

Don Day

Carlos Evia

Mark Giffin

Scott Hudson

Joe Pairman

John Hunt

Roundtable:

Medical - not present

Education - working on the personas

Software - Michael pulling together straw man of 

Marketing - Noz Urbina to form/lead, Michael to set up kickoff

Machine Industry - Michael setting up meeting w/Jan, Sissi

Discussion:

Markdown - Jarno published updated plugin and including additional functionality for sections. Carlos has been working on a demo. At one point, DITA Publishers had a mapping to json (generate json using DITA). Bertrand was working on it?

Markdown demo: http://carlosevia.github.io

Use case: Develop content in Markdown and export to DITA for inclusion in an existing DITA doc set.

Anything at H2 level will become a nested topic. You must explicitly define a section for the section to be created. Why use this instead of pandoc or jekyl? Would be nice to be able to roundtrip, so content could be used in Swagger or other tool (Slate?)

You must use a dita map, and the first topic cannot be markdown.

Carlos to work on some additional mappings.

Don Day - put together a wiki page scraper that will output DITA. any2dita.com source on github.com/donrday

create dita from other formats to convert and put in an existing repository

want to add hdita mode.

FYI: Download results fairly quickly, as housekeeping will clean it out after about 2 hours!

dita.xml.org has a blog post (search for hdita ) regarding mappings.

Carlos looking for articles claiming that “DITA has too many tags”.

One of the major issues with the DITA spec is with the number of examples and content model listings. (appearance of complexity due to the “page count” of the spec)

Measurement: A DITA topic without additional domains is actually a smaller content model than HTML! 

Should the SC provide formal feedback to Jarno for his work on Markdown?

Nested topics is perfectly valid DITA, so that is good.

Not try to enable everything that Tech Comm needs, but more from what web content providers need.

medium.com authoring interface is extremely simple. Designed for narrative text, but a good example of what we should focus on to support the authoring experience.

“Author Experience” 

Next meeting: 2 weeks from today

Thanks and best regards,

Scott Hudson

Senior Consultant

Comtech Services Inc.

710 Kipling Street, Suite 400

Denver, CO 80215

303-232-7586

 

CIDM will be hosting the Content Management Strategies/DITA North America 2015 conference in Chicago, Illinois April 20-22, 2015. More information at:

http://www.cm-strategies.com/2015/index.htm