Meeting minutes 2020 03 12

Attendance: Robert Anderson, Roger Sheen, Jarno Elovirta, John Kirklis, Frank Wegmann, Eric Sirois, John Pashley, Bill Gamboa, Greg Wait, Kris Eberlein

Item 1: Any updates about prior releases?

Any patches planned or other concerns about 3.4? 3.4.1 has been mostly on hold due to a branch filter fix. Appears that fix works as intended, just doesn't cover all cases of the too-many-files. Suggestion to rephrase the release notes to be explicit, and then release.

Item 2: DITA-OT 3.5 Development status and updates

Current goal: 3.5 in April. Have a few items still in progress that would be nice to close out, and then release. Jarno is working on several items related to DITA 2.0. Have now bundled 2.0 draft grammar files as a plugin too, and added support for a couple of simple items to let the two work more easily together.

Definitely do not have support for all DITA 2.0 features, but have a start.

Also working on using a Java Store for the job, makes some of our calls simpler. One side effect - Jarno has rewritten most places that use JAXP API (Transformer API) to replace with Saxon's S9 API. We've been using it for ages but this makes it more official, calls it more directly. Not visible to end users but cleans up our code, removes an indirect link between our code and Saxon.

Eric asks - any potential impact to someone creating a specialization? Answer: if you've extended the Java code, maybe, but if you're just using Ant / XSLT and DITA Specializations, no impact.

Also, as part of all this, trying to get more XSpec tests...

Timing of the release: middle of the month seems good; next contributor call should be April 2, and gives us a chance to discuss and confirm. Would also make it out by DITA North America.

3.5 project board: https://github.com/orgs/dita-ot/projects/18

Item 3: Doc updates and plans, update on documentation call

Couple items in the queue in addition to updates for the next release.

Roger restored minimal analytics / tracking on the website - have some historic data on page views, but no cookies or personal data. Netlify analytics still work but only give the last 30 days of data. Data we have includes what pages get most views, any 404s, desktop vs mobile.

For a while we've been releasing DITA-OT as Homebrew install. Roger's been doing that manually for each release. There's a GitHub action to do that automatically - when a new release is detected, it can take the release artifact, create new pull request against Homebrew. https://github.com/mislav/bump-homebrew-formula-action At first glance didn't look too difficult, but Roger will discuss with Jarno later.

Long term doc goal: been thinking about doing more testing with the docs (language quality, style guide, etc). Vail is used in doc community; recently released DITA support so could now use it. Experimenting locally but hasn't been 100% successful yet, but hope to figure out soon. Pet project to play with as time permits.

Is there an easy way to figure out which DITA elements map to which HTML elements? Vail tests things by running the HTML5 transform and then testing that. So kind of have to reverse engineer it -- they ignore code blocks, so we have to figure out which HTML elements to tell them to ignore, etc. Jarno has created a list like that before - Roger will try to track that down.

Any consideration of splitting up plugin information between "using plugins" and "developing plugins"? Jarno was looking for the coding conventions topic and it didn't come up quickly - not sure if it would have been easier if those had been split.

Item 4: DITA-OT Day

Planning on hold due to that virus thing we're all hearing about.

Item 5: Other topics

Have a new issue about project files, enhancement request: https://github.com/dita-ot/dita-ot/issues/3474

Think this is the first request we've gotten to update it. Jarno deliberately didn't add support for extensions in the initial release; this is to allow extension of context structure with another ditaval. Not sure if this is the correct solution or not; this could be handled by adding some things or by replacing some things, and need to determine the right approach. (Does the ditaval in this context extend already specified ones, or replace them?) Also another field in context (input resource), and you can only have one -- what if you extend a context with a new input file? Does that one replace or add new? Well, it can't add, so it must be replace -- but it makes us uncomfortable to have some fields function as "replace" and others function as "extend". So ... this is a valid request, but there is a lot of complexity here.

Item 6: Backlog discussion

Project boards: Project boards: https://github.com/orgs/dita-ot/projects/