Seattle-area DITA listening session on Jan 24, 2017

Are you interested in DITA want to provide feedback to the DITA community that might have an impact on its future? The OASIS DITA Adoption Technical Committee is extending an invitation to STC members and participants to attend a Seattle-area “DITA listening session” on Tuesday, January 24, 2017, 3:30-6:00 PM.

Where:

Xeditor (inside the Galvanize Building)
111 S. Jackson St.
Seattle, WA 98104

Although members of these Technical Committees interact with DITA prospects and DITA practitioners routinely at conferences and online, we suspect that our picture of how things are actually going for DITA companies is incomplete if we do not have venues for those DITA users and architects who have not had opportunity to attend conferences, local user groups (if they exist), or technical forums. These listening sessions are a form of outreach to DITA people where they live and work. The sessions are an opportunity for the Committee to obtain feedback from current, past and future DITA users. The Technical Committee recently released DITA Version 1.3 and is now assessing what sorts of features and/or capabilities might be important for DITA 2.0. See http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/dita/v1.3/

Session Structures:

30 minute – meet n’ greet and then a 60 minute – attendee roundtable—how is DITA doing at your company?
30 minute – Q&A – OASIS TC members asking attendees
30 minute – Q&A – local attendees asking OASIS TC members
(Optional) Dinner and refreshments at a local watering hole (no host)

On site event but no registration required! Please RSVP by January 20th to:

Anthony Apodaca, Business Development
212 884 9402
a.apodaca@xeditor.com | http://www.xeditor.com 

I'd also like to find someone to host a Redmond/Kirkland/Bellvue-area session on Jan 25. Please let me know if your company would be willing to host!

DocBook v5.1 is now an official OASIS Standard!

OASIS is pleased to announce that DocBook Version 5.1. has been approved by the membership as an OASIS Standard [1].

The call to vote was made on 09 November 2016 [2] and the ballot closed on 22 November 2016. A minimum of 42 affirmative votes was needed in order to win approval. The finally vote tally was 63 affirmative votes with 4 abstentions. 

Our congratulations to the members of the TC and to the community of implementers, developers and users who have brought the work successfully to this milestone

DocBook is a general purpose [XML] schema particularly well suited to books and papers about computer hardware and software (though it is by no means limited to these applications).

The Version 5.1 release introduces assemblies for topic-oriented authoring. It also addresses a selection of bugs and feature requests.

The Technical Committee provides the DocBook 5.1 schema in other schema languages, including W3C XML Schema and an XML DTD, but the RELAX NG Schema is the normative schema.

URIs:

The prose specifications and related files are available here:

DocBook Version 5.1

HTML (Authoritative): 

http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/v5.1/os/docbook-v5.1-os.html 

PDF: 

http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/v5.1/os/docbook-v5.1-os.pdf

Editable source:

http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/v5.1/os/docbook-v5.1-os.xml

Schemas: 

http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/v5.1/os/schemas/

DocBook V4.x conversion tools: 

http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/v5.1/os/tools/

Distribution ZIP files

For your convenience, OASIS provides a complete package of the prose specification and related files in a ZIP distribution file. You can download the ZIP file here:

http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/v5.1/os/docbook-v5.1-os.zip

Voting opens for DocBook v5.1 as an OASIS Standard

The ballot to approve DocBook v5.1 as an OASIS standard is now open, starting at 09 November 2016 at 00:00 UTC. The ballot closes at 22 November 2016 at 11:59 UTC. 

This is a call to the primary or alternate representatives of OASIS Organizational Members to vote. 

If your company is a member of OASIS, please encourage your representative to vote in favor of this standard at: https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/ballot.php?id=3010 

The Version 5.1 release introduces assemblies for topic-oriented authoring. It also addresses a selection of bugs and feature requests.

To view the specification, please see:

http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/v5.1/cos01/docbook-v5.1-cos01.html

Media Standards for XML

Please excuse the vanity post, but I'm proud to be a contributing author to The Language of Technical Communication! My article is entitled, "Media Standards for XML" on pg 78. Lots of great information in this book compiled by Ray Gallon. Check it out!

A Geek Force for Good

I want to give a shout out to the Information Technology Disaster Resource Center (ITDRC), which helps communities with their technology infrastructure after a disaster.


I found out about the group during the 2013 floods in Colorado, where we specifically deployed to Lyons, Jamestown and Boulder.

The ITDRC has Field Disaster Response Teams (FDRT) and Remote Response Teams (RRT) from all across the United States and are comprised of service oriented IT and AV Professionals from many technology disciplines who volunteer their expertise and skills in times of disaster. We use our tech skills to help communities and small businesses continue operations and successfully recover from disaster.

If you have any technical expertise (especially with wifi, networking, radio communications), we would love to get you on board! Visit http://itdrc.org/volunteer.html for more info. We also love equipment and financial donations. See if your company would be willing to help us help those in need!

This past weekend, we held an Operations Field Exercise in Richardson, Texas. It was a great time to connect with other tech geeks and learn about our deployment kits and mobile command centers.

DITA 1.3 is now an official OASIS Standard

I'm pleased to announce DITA 1.3 is now an official OASIS standard!

From the press release:

 "The OASIS open standards consortium today announced that its members have approved the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) version 1.3 as an OASIS Standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification. DITA defines an XML architecture for designing, writing, and publishing information in numerous formats, including print, Web-based, mobile, and electronic publications. DITA is widely used for professionally-published books and magazines, technical documentation, online help, training and course development, marketing materials, and medical information because of its modular, topic-based approach and its ability to support content reuse.
This release of DITA comes in three parts, optimized for different audiences:

• Base Edition is designed for application developers and users who need only the most fundamental pieces of the DITA framework.
• Technical Content Edition includes specializations usually used by technical communicators.
• All Inclusive Edition is designed for implementers who want all OASIS-approved specializations, as well as users who develop learning and training materials."

 For the spec or to download the schemas, go to: http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/dita/v1.3/os/

The latest version of the DITA Open Toolkit also has support for v1.3, and can be downloaded here:
http://www.dita-ot.org/download

Several XML Editors have also added support for DITA v1.3, including:

• oXygen XML Editor
• XMetaL