dita — archive

[Su-Laine Yeo]

Hi Robert and Jeff, Regarding the question of making a feature optional vs. marking it as non-normative: If something is optional but normative, we will still be limited in future versions of DITA 1.x to keep the spec backwards-compatible, so problems in the spec will still have the potential to haunt us. Whereas if the section is non-normative (or taken out of the spec entirely) it won’t haunt us. Regarding the groups in IBM that are eager for this feature: Can you not give them support for a feature that isn't in the normative DITA spec? The main reason to mark something non-normative is so that if the users hate some aspect of it, we can fix the problem in the next round of the spec instead of telling the users, "sorry, can't change that because of backwards-compatibility". I agree entirely with Jeff's suggestion that for 1.3, we should require one or two implementations on the ground before including a new feature in the spec. Su-Laine