Dita Wikiby Don Day, Chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
Scope and compatibility statement
DITA 1.0 is a stable release; for the 1.x extent of updates to that specification, new features and bug fixes are to be backwards-compatible for the current DITA user base.
DITA 2.0 will be the first opportunity to introduce incompatible design changes deemed necessary for the future enhancement of the architecture.
OASIS DITA 1.0 (June 2005):
DITA 1.0 is the formalization of the DITA DTDs and Schemas contributed by IBM to OASIS in 2004. The goal of development through the 1.x series of releases is to maintain backwards compatibility with previous 1.x releases. The DITA TC has collected and prioritized a number of requirements based on known shortcomings, user requests, and relationship with other standards and industry trends. Starting with DITA 1.1, compatible updates will be released peridically while gauging the right time to begin work on 2.0, which by definition is the first planned opportunity to enable critical new requirements that necessarily break backwards compatibility. Don't panic! This roadmap probably represents several years of effort just to get each release approved, followed by long periods of exploitation of introduced features in tools and other infrastructure.
Backwards-compatible bug fixes will be released from time to time as Candidate Releases keyed to just-previous approved standards. The last such release was DITA 1.0.1 in the fall of 2005.
OASIS DITA 1.1 (planned for mid-year 2007):
DITA 1.1 has two major themes:
- Book deliverables (revision of the demo bookmap specialization)
Data extensibility (extensible metadata attributes, <data> element, <unknown> element for foreign vocabularies)
The updates for the Book deliverables theme include:
Add book-level processing to DITA based upon Bookmap Revision proposal. See notes on xNAL in bookmap
Shortdesc proposal (combines original numbers #41, 42)
- Indexing (unified proposal due March 14)
To be discussed on March 7:Glossary submission
To be voted on March 7: Shortdesc (dependency for revised bookmap)
The updates for Data extensibility theme include:
- Attributes
New <data> element (#9) (updated proposal available in this note)
Support foreign content vocabularies such as MathML and SVG with <unknown> (#35)
Note: the changes for data require a change to the structure of the DTDs and schemas. The changes are described in the New design patterns for 1.1 document.
Other:
- Clarification of Chunk attribute
Decision pending:
Translation retrofit (outcome of Translation SC)
Prototype DTDs:
- Bookmap has now been merged with the 1.1 package
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/document.php?document_id=19752&wg_abbrev=dita, nearly complete, includes all of the 1.1 items
OASIS DITA 1.2 (2008):
Documentation (Spec updates):
- #23 Embed version numbers into catalogs
Naming convention
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/200509/msg00024.html (approved 2005-09-30)
- Documenting DITA design principles
- Details in the DITA spec
- Recognizing DITA Documents (spec update)
Translation best practices/workflow recommendations (outcome of Translation SC)
Architecture:
- Keyref architecture (#40)
- Constraints - restriction without specialization (#34)
Relax the related links content model so it can be empty (more of a fix issue)
- Domain and topic integration (provided function used by #33) (#32)
- Introduce new, more general task type (#19)
- Conref series:
- Improved specialization support (#17a)
- - with delta (applying changes)(#17b)
- Referencing a range of elements (#17c)
- Conref and conditional processing - preserve without resolving (#17d)
- push instead of pull (#17e)
- Improved specialization support (#17a)
- Semantic (implicit) linking (#43)
- Reconcile metadata elements in topics versus maps (#7)
Elements/content models:
- Create elements for text attributes with translatable text (#11)
- Allow tm to contain images or logo content (#8)
- Keywords in keywords (#2)
- Nested Sections Solution Proposal (#00?)
- Structured Sections (replaced by "Nested sections proposed compromise") (#47)
Attributes:
- Make @role (and other enumerated attribues) unenumerated (#6)
- Move @format and @scope into rel-atts (#18)
Additional Book-related:
- Add ANSI warning labels as addition to element (#5)
- Use subset of OASIS xNAL standard for addresses (#4)
Specializations:
- Specialize glossary entry and definition elements (#14)
Move <refsyn> to a domain (depends on #32) (#33)
OASIS DITA 1.3:
This release will consist of any items prioritized out of the DITA 1.2 scope of work, as well as any new requirements or design directions not yet identified. Unless major issues arise, this is likely to close out the 1.x series of releases in this roadmap.
OASIS DITA 2.0:
The DITA 2.0 major version represents an opportunity for major architectural revisions to the DITA standard.