dita — archive

[Paul Grosso]

I really think we need to have a reset on our ideas for conformance for the DITA 1.2 spec. Some of us have been in the standards business for a quarter of a century. (Some of us have written technical standards with lawyers, right Eliot?) It takes a humungous effort to write a standard of any size that is precise enough to make detailed conformance criteria really feasible. The current DITA standard is so far from being there--and the TC members are so far from having the time and expertise to get it there--that we simply cannot expect to get there for DITA 1.2. And, in fact, writing a spec that is so carefully phrased may well make it less comprehensible to the average reader and, in the end, make it less easy for implementors to comply to. Finally, we really have to get DITA 1.2 out. If we were a software company, our customers would have given up on us by now and be demanding their maintenance contract money back. Let's realize we cannot make another pass through the spec for conformance language, go for the simplest conformance statement we can make, and get on with it. paul >