Feedback from Mary McRae

Hi, fellow TC members.


We got feedback from Mary McRae about the draft of the DITA 1.2 spec
yesterday. I've added Mary's comments to a Wiki page, to make them
easier to read -- and to make it easier for us to track our progress in
fixing issues:


http://wiki.oasis-open.org/dita/CD01


If you browse through the page, you'll see that we are left with four
main areas of work or negotiation:



  Need for a namespace document
  (PDF) Stylistic improvements, to better
align it with OASIS templates (footers, styles for various levels of
titles)
  (PDF) Need to fix text overruns in tables
  (XHTML) Mary has requested changes from how
the DITA 1.0 and DITA 1.1 specs were issued:
  
    Number all topics with section and
subsection numbers

    Remove link previews generated from
<shortdesc> elements, to remove duplication
    Ensure that all topics contain a link to
the "Next" topic in the reading order
  

I've requested feedback from Mary about which
issues need to addressed before we can issue the spec for public
review. I sincerely hope that she will permit us to finish refining our
PDF styling during the public review. However, the first and second
changes requested to the XHTML output call for more serious reflection,
as they are departures from how we've done things previously and
arguably counter-intuitive to DITA principles.


Thoughts from other TC members?


The third XHTML item either already is effectively handled -- the URL
at the bottom of each topic takes the reader back to the appropriate
bookmark for the topic in the TOC -- or could be addressed by an
override that IBM uses for their tutorial specialization.


Best,


Kris


Kristen James Eberlein

Principal consultant, Eberlein Consulting

Secretary, OASIS DITA Technical Committee

Charter member, OASIS DITA Adoption Committee

www.eberleinconsulting.com

+1 919 682-2290; keberlein (skype)