dita — archive

My increasing concerns about LwDITA and template-based specialization

From: Kristen Eberlein <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Date: Mon, 23 Jan 2017 12:49:00 -0000

Michael, thanks for expanding on your vision for the template-based specialization mechanism. It does clarify your thinking to me. The main problem I see, however, is that this vision (in more than the broadest details) exists primarily in your head. It has not been socialized to others in the Lightweight DITA subcommittee (or the DITA TC) nor has it been instantiated in any design documents. That makes it difficult/impossible to include it in a release. Do you have any thoughts on how to remedy this? Do you have additional time to spend working on this? I am interested in seeing a release of Lightweight DITA in the near future, definitely before DITA 2.0. Best, Kris Kristen James Eberlein Chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee Principal consultant, Eberlein Consulting www.eberleinconsulting.com +1 919 682-2290; kriseberlein (skype) On 1/21/2017 10:33 PM, Michael Priestley wrote: Hi Kris, Here's my perspective: >I'm not sure that adding new attributes and elements in the spec in >order to drive tool development is an appropriate thing to do. I think as long as the markup is semantic, this is not only appropriate but normal. You could argue that every element and attribute in full DITA was added to drive tool development, in the sense that none of that markup had any meaning or effect until it was turned into some kind of output by a tool. There are many examples of elements and attributes supporting specific tooling requirements, from the filtering attributes in DITA 1.0 to the assessment elements in the learning and training specialization. >I think it would 100% appropriate if someone wants to build and sell an >application, and include with the application directions on how to >create an annotated XML file that can processed to get a monolithic DTD. >Or have an Open Source project which produces a plug-in that oXygen will >bundle with their application. And if they use specialized elements and attributes to do that annotation, then their annotations will not be portable across template generation tools. It really will be bound to one tool, instead of being a standard. This is perfectly appropriate, of course, but it's a different use case than having a standard that allows multiple tools to coexist and work on the same content set. >However, I truly don't see an argument for adding new elements and >attributes to the specification in order to develop one-time artifacts >(the templates) that can be fed into tooling to autogenerate DTDs Maybe this is where our different interpretations start. I don't see these as one-time artifacts. Over time the goal is to have the same annotated template support multiple outputs, many of which could require ongoing updates and maintenance: - the documentation (update to address the requirements of new users, or just improve based on existing usage problems) - stylesheet overrides (for example to generate section titles - update to address changing editorial rules/requirements) - authoring templates (as with documentation, update to address requirements of new users etc.) In addition to those use cases, there is the (re)use of the template by other designs - the goal is to allow reuse of specialized elements through conref between templates, which will be simpler and more direct for users to work with and understand compared to our current full DITA modularization with multiple entity overrides. I don't know if this helps to convince you, but I hope that I've addressed some of the concerns you've identified here. Michael Priestley, Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM) Enterprise Content Technology Strategist [email protected] From: Kristen James Eberlein <[email protected]> To: DITA TC <[email protected]> Date: 01/19/2017 08:15 AM Subject: [dita] My increasing concerns about LwDITA and template-based specialization Sent by: <[email protected]> I think we all would like to specialization easier to do. But ... I'm not sure that adding new attributes and elements in the spec in order to drive tool development is an appropriate thing to do. I think it would 100% appropriate if someone wants to build and sell an application, and include with the application directions on how to create an annotated XML file that can processed to get a monolithic DTD. Or have an Open Source project which produces a plug-in that oXygen will bundle with their application. However, I truly don't see an argument for adding new elements and attributes to the specification in order to develop one-time artifacts (the templates) that can be fed into tooling to autogenerate DTDs I'm going to need a whole lot more convincing. It just seems wrong. -- Best, Kris Kristen James Eberlein Chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee Principal consultant, Eberlein Consulting www.eberleinconsulting.com +1 919 682-2290; kriseberlein (skype) --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this mail list, you must leave the OASIS TC that generates this mail. Follow this link to all your TCs in OASIS at: https://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/portal/my_workgroups.php