NOTE: Version 1.3 was released in 2006. This information should no longer be considered up to date. Up to date information on the toolkit can be found here: The DITA Open Toolkit

The next major release (1.3) of the DITA Open Toolkit is being evaluated for scope and schedule. The project team has been tracking requirements coming from the OASIS DITA TC, the dita-users support forum, and among the dita-ot developer community discussions. The open requirements are listed below. The purpose of this document is to host separate design discussions for each of these items. Out of these discussions, the project team will assess the relative priorities and available resource (contributors and code, for example) that can be applied to the proposed schedule.

Don Day, DITA OT Team Lead

Tentative schedule:

Task_Name, Duration, Start, Finish

Coding, 1 Month, start of July, around 06-8-10

Test Execution, ~ 1 Month, Mid July, around 06-8-22

Release Prep, ~ 1.5 weeks, around 06-8-23, end of August

Release, , end of August, end of August

1. Support for DITA 1.1/bookmap (stakeholders: OASIS DITA TC and popular community request)

2. Eclipse integration (stakeholders: community and dev team)

3. Incremental builds (stakeholders: advanced users, dita-ot developers)--Deferred to 1.4 to gather more case studies, understand requirements better.

4. GUI/usability (stakeholders: dita-user community, loudly heard at recent DITA conferences)--Revised to focus first on installability, defer GUI to related projects (much as editor vendors provide their own GUIs, in effect).

5. Fix topicmerge (stakeholders: dev team, judged to be strategic and a necessary base for the new bookmap support)

6. Fix indexing (stakeholders: known lack of full support for all users, languages)

7. Fully enable the XML catalog resolver (stakeholders: )

8. Ant refactoring (stakeholders: dev team, judged to be strategic for toolkit maintenance and future plugin development)

9. Document refactoring (stakeholders: end-users, other document authors)



If you have requests for other issues that you feel are critical for 1.3, please send them to Don Day (dond at us.ibm.com) so that I can compare them with other reports. The agenda for 1.3 is already very large for an aggressive schedule, therefore I would need to understand the value and justification of any new request for the larger community in order to assess it against these that have already been identified. Thanks!