Meeting minutes 2021 08 05

Attendance: Robert Anderson, Radu Coravu, John Pashley, John Kirkilis, Jarno Elovirta, Zoe Lawson, Lief Erickson, Roger Sheen, Julien Lacour

Item 1: Any updates about prior releases?

Any patches planned or other concerns about 3.6?

Discussion about FOP update - would like to get to latest which has a fix for longstanding colsep/rowsep issue that messed with a lot of renderers. That would be a dependency upgrade which is confined to major releases, so that is not something we'd expect in 3.6.2; more likely in 3.7. This is an argument for separating all of the plugins from the core DITA-OT, so that the plugin with FOP could be independently released.

Item 2: DITA-OT 3.Next Development status and updates

Project board for next release: https://github.com/orgs/dita-ot/projects/27

Small new feature for XSL tasks in our pipeline tasks; in Ant, you can specify the style with an attribute or element, but pipeline only accepted the attribute name. Now updated to accept an Ant fileset resource to pass in the XSL. Not used anywhere yet but could move there. Could also allow specifying XSL using a plugin ID.

Merged PR to upgrade dependencies on Saxon and FOP. Saxon update was a bigger one, started a year ago for Saxon 10. New Saxon is an XSL 3 processor, but our code was all XSL 2, and version 3 changes how errors / missing files are handled. XSL 3, if you access missing file, it crashes the process. Needed to add Java handling to mimic the old behavior. So, this lets us move to 10 but keep the XSL more or less backwards compatible.

Still have the Java 11 topic showing "in progress", but have not been working on that lately so might move it back to "to do" column. Problem with it was a Windows issue, newer versions of OT slowed down.

Roger has PR coming out of last call, moving CSS links to end of HTML header: https://github.com/dita-ot/dita-ot/pull/3770 Looks good; lots of discussion on how the templates in this section are historical, likely put in back in DeveloperWorks days (before DITA-OT 1.0). Guess is that there was not a specific intent to the order, and the change makes sense. To avoid edge cases, best to validate whether this introduces any HTML5 validity issues before merging.

Discussion about figure titles; someone noticed recently that HTML5 has a period with figure number, PDF has colon, why? Also some sections hard-code the period, some use ColonSymbol, some use variable? Would love to be consistent, problem is we know someone will complain -- "yes it's consistent now but it's broken in MY output". If we were to fix, would likely need docs on how to restore the old value, or maybe a one-off plugin in the registry that would swap it.

Item 3: Doc updates and plans

Open pull request from Stefan to look for clarification on the two string approaches. Couple tweaks needed but will get to that soon.

Item 4: DITA 2.0

One more grammar file change in the works, for diagnostics elements in troubleshooting

Item 5: Other topics

Extended discussion of isolating plugins from DITA-OT base, so that they could be updated independently, more like the Eclipse model. Not going there for now; lots of pros and cons discussed, but don't have the resources to do that now even if we wanted to. Comment that tracking the many different version numbers would become a real headache if authors using OT ever needed to manage it on their own; expectation is that they just want to install a version of OT and be done. Software dev community (rather than author community) is more likely to be used to having to track many different versioned dependencies.

AH plugin has been moved to another repo within the DITA-OT org, but not quite finished with setup; discussed that at last month's meeting. Still needs a README with tips on how to submit updates.

Question: in MD section of OT docs, difference between format=markdown and format=mdita, seems format=markdown does a lot of the mdita type translations, so wasn't sure which to use? markdown support began before mdita was a thing. Basically "markdown" tries to handle everything as well as it can, while "mdita" sticks closer to the mdita spec-in-progress, and is more likely to error out for things that are invalid in mdita. (Note: mdita has changed some since the implementation was originally written, and since that implementation was documented.)

Item 6: Backlog discussion

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

Time to go through pull requests, issues tracker, determine how to handle open issues.