Meeting minutes 2019 01 10

Attendance: Robert Anderson, Bob Johnson, Jarno Elovirta, Roger Sheen, Frank Wegmann, John Pashley, Radu Coravu, Shane Taylor, Bill Gamboa,

Item 1: Any updates about prior releases?

3.2.1 is out, 3.2.2 branch opened this week but no project board yet.

Item 2: DITA-OT 3.3 Development status and updates

3.3 project board: https://github.com/orgs/dita-ot/projects/9

Plan from December call was to schedule 3.3. release for end of February, and check in today. So:

Robert hopes to get in:

• Hazard statement support for HTML5
• Table entry rotation

Jarno hopes to add some smaller (invisible to end user) items. Hope to make them backwards compatible in the Java sense. Right now, if you want to modify a Java module, you have to get into the Java code; hoping to find a way to make it easier to add in Sax filters to run with a module.

Several things already done, in particular, moving XSL into base plugin. This will be invisible to anyone who uses the plugin: syntax for XSL imports, but if you use relative paths that start with ../../../xsl/ to get to the root plugin directory, you will need to update.

Radu just found a bug related to bookmaps, asking Robert to take a look: https://github.com/dita-ot/dita-ot/issues/3174

Radu also mentions issue with non-DITA resources no longer copied to output folder, maybe we could find a solution in 3.3? Issue did not exist in 2.x.

• May need to make an inverse of the current file set -- instead of "process all (this and that)" need "process all except (this and that)"
• Follow-on discussion about copying external resources. Problem generally is that https style links are valid as an input, and DITA topics can be read, but they don't work everywhere in every part of the code (so you end up in some cases trying to copy a youtube link from an object element)
• More follow on discussion about temp file names in error logs - any way to get the original name? Currently causes trouble with (some) error messages, such as "Cannot link to X" with a generated name; also problems with the long-supported art label parameter.

Item 3: Doc & website updates and plans

Based on discussion of XSL above: we should probably add more coding conventions (like the plugin: syntax for imports) for XSLT and for Ant, which would help plugin developers and also help us know what is safe (safer) to change. Cannot really be enforced but would help us all. Already have some coding conventions, including the plugin: syntax, listed at: https://www.dita-ot.org/dev/topics/plugin-coding-conventions.html

Jarno and Roger met last week in Helsinki and worked on several small items.

• Restore ability to look at history of when a doc had changed (links to latest change in the topic) - link is working now in footer of latest dev docs
• New in the footer of each topic on the page - link to the full change history of topic
• Bootstrap 4 upgrade - several updates to make https://www.dita-ot.org more responsive for newer browsers; also drops support for some much older browsers. There are a few visible changes: updated base font from 14px to 16px (which is default for most browsers). Generally good for lots of reasons / lots of peoples, but has caused a few glitches with table flows etc, several have been fixed but may be more to come. Please let us know / open an issue if you find anything like that which looks funny. Site has been up and running for couple weeks on staging area, and now moved to main page during this call.
• Google indexing - had noticed that search results were not always ideal, due to having multiple versions of our doc on the site. Top result might link you to docs for 2.x instead of recent release, but you're also offered links to the others. So: disallowed search engines from indexing the old releases (with robots.txt file). Search should now result in latest dev docs, which in most cases is equal to the latest release plus a few new items. Dev docs also give you those nice footer links (last change / history / edit this page).
• Question from Jarno: on dev docs we have a banner that says "You're viewing dev docs, here is a link to the latest stable one." Why don't we have one when you look at 2.x that says "You're looking at an old release, here is the latest stable one." Roger says: good idea, I'll do that. 👍
• Google analytics now turned off. Came up when Jarno noticed we should be notifying people about Google's cookie with a banner, and Roger felt rather strongly we should just remove the analytics rather than annoy people. The data could not be used to identify anybody, so was not a GDPR issue, but we were not using the data so decided to turn it off until we come up with a way to use it. (Of course this means that today, as we update to latest bootstrap, we no longer can tell if we have anybody using IE8.)

Item 4: DITA-OT Day

Our site still has a banner link to DITA-OT day. We usually have that leading up to an event, but leave link in nav menu so you can go see recordings. That nav link goes right to the conference page. Maybe we should have a page on our own site that gives a summary, and links over? Those (speaking up) on call like that idea - and maybe the nav would have something like "Events" or "Training" that encourages people to click, rather than "DITA-OT Day" which might not be meaningful until you know what it is.