What is going on?

Following on from my last posts about the complexity of S1000D I thought that the following may well be of interest.

A short while ago I sat in with colleagues, remotely and not face to face, during a presentation on DITA and S1000D. The discussion was hosted by an organisation which has been involved in mark-up languages for pretty well 20 years and has an interest in DITA and its community.

The presentation was given by a group of like minded French people who are involved in some R&D work associated with the convergence between S1000D and DITA.

To be honest I thought that this route was no longer functioning due to the argument along the lines of "Why would you want to have a DITA version of S1000D".  A few years ago we had a long discussion within the company that I work for on this very subject. We, as a company, are heavily involved in DITA as well as S1000D although I must admit that the work does not tend to overlap too much. At the end of the discussion we pretty well came to the conclusion that if you purchased or maintained a product using part numbers  and it had a life-time in decades then S1000D was a better bet than DITA. Having kept a bit of a watch on this I don't think that I have seen anything to make us think any differently.

As far as I can see the R&D group were working on the premise that S1000D was making it difficult to handle Applicability and also there were problems when a sub-contractor needs to convert to other specifications (I presume since it was not clear).

The presentation proceeded to provide arguments for their approach. But to be honest although we thought that the premise was to simplify the S1000D Specification the group had, we thought, seemed to miss some factors and they finished up with something that was more complex than what we have right now. One of my colleagues commented after the presentation -" I thought that they were going to make S1000D Simpler".

I also detected a DITA thought process seen before - "we don't have something for this so we will invent an idea and put in a structure which allows us to expand". The beauty of S1000D, putting aside some of the more complex notions, is that we have the basic structures which to be honest have been around for many years in publications work and which most authors understand without too much cerebral work.

S1000D still falls into the category of "use what you need and leave the rest". Some may need the complexity of the latest 'extras' but most still only need the basic bits to achieve a really good quality Technical Publication output which can be maintained relatively easily and cheaply over the years.