NOTE: This wiki is provided by the OASIS standards consortium as a collaborative tool for the OASIS DITA Help Subcommittee. Members of the Subcommittee are permitted to post to these pages (SC Members Page). As this is an official workspace of the TC, the OASIS IPR Policy and other OASIS rules apply to its use.

To learn more about the work of the Subcommittee, send a comment, or join this effort, visit the OASIS DITA Help Subcommittee homepage. Prospective members of the subcommittee must first join the OASIS DITA Technical Committee (TC Members Page).

Wiki pages are transient documents, so intermediate edits may not be saved. SC members should move all permanent work and stable artifacts to the SC's document repository, where the archival work product of the SC also can be viewed by the public.

Wiki home page for the OASIS DITA Help Subcommittee

Welcome! The URL for this page is: http://wiki.oasis-open.org/dita/ditahelp

The formal name of the subcommittee is "The OASIS DITA Help Subcommittee".

Purpose

The OASIS DITA Help Subcommittee has the following top-level purpose:

  1. develop a top-level design for authoring of Help systems and user assistance content for implementation using DITA;
  2. establish recommendations for the integration of DITA-authored Help systems and software applications using context-sensitivity;
  3. remove the obstacles to effective use of DITA for Help systems through the creation of best practice guidelines, cookbooks and worked examples, and to promote the use of DITA for creating Help systems and user assistance content;
  4. develop informal support for processing DITA for delivery as Help systems and user assistance;
  5. establish guidelines that promote best practices for applying standard DITA approaches to Help systems and user assistance content.

The deliverables of the DHSC will be:

  1. recommendations to the DITA TC for specification changes to better support Help systems and user assistance content;
  2. a high-level processing model description that defines the standard use of DITA for Help systems and user assistance content;
  3. explanations and guidelines for the use of DITA for Help systems and user assistance content.

The DITA Help SC wiki will support collaborative design work between and during meetings.

Definition

DITA Help, as defined by the OASIS DITA Help SC (DHSC):

Current activities

We meet every three weeks via teleconference.

Some draft changes to the DITA standard, aimed at DITA 1.3, are being discussed. Another Wiki page provides guidelines for DTD/Schema development for sub-committees.

Status of the subcommittee representations

This information in this Wiki reflects exploratory work. It is not a reliable guide on the future direction of DITA. It should not be taken as guidance for using DITA or for developing DITA tools.

Working discussion about objectives

Moved to http://wiki.oasis-open.org/dita-adoption/ditaadoptionhelp (to be deleted from this page)

Background

TBA

Email: <tony.self AT SPAMFREE hyperwrite DOT com>

Reference Articles and Papers

In 1999, Joe Welinske of WinWriters (now WritersUA) instigated the formation of the Help for the Web Initiative, a volunteer committee under the loose auspices of the World Wide Web Consortium. The initiative had a flurry had activity for about six months, but then stagnated. The papers contributed to the initiative included:

At the WritersUA annual conference in Palm Springs in 2006, a meeting of interested parties was held to discuss a markup language for help. The outcomes of that meeting included the setting up of an OASIS user assistance discussion list, and a discussion paper by Tony Self. The OASIS assistance discussion list started with Paul Prescod devising a very useful set of goals. Unfortunately, after an initial flurry of ideas and messages, momentum was lost and the list became inactive.

Other XML for User Assistance resources include:

Meeting Notes

ditahelp (last edited 2011-01-24 02:13:31 by tself)