Plans for DITA Open Toolkit version 1.5

We currently anticipate that DITA-OT 1.5 will contain support for the DITA 1.2 specification. Development of 1.5 will be broken up into a series of iterations, with one or more DITA 1.2 item completed in each iteration. We will update the plans here as each iteration begins and ends. Each iteration will end with a milestone release available under the "test build" heading at the DITA-OT download page on SourceForge.

At present, the DITA 1.2 DTDs and schemas are integrated in demo mode. They will only be used when documents reference them directly, or when the catalog is updated so that they are the default. As the document types become more stable, we will integrate them so that ordinary documents validate against them, but for now any files using the default document types will validate against DITA 1.1.

Items available in Milestone 1 (May 30, 2008)

• DITA 1.2: Include DITA 1.2 draft DTDs and Schemas (preserve DITA 1.1 modules for users that want a specific version)
• DITA 1.2 OASIS Item 12017: Updated metadata in maps to match topics. Need update to code that pushes metadata into topics and pulls metadata from topics; need to update output processors that use this metadata. 12017 design
• DITA 1.2 OASIS Item 12018: support for navtitle element (navtitle attribute is deprecated), possibly other elements. 12018 design
• RFE 1972537 Let users specify reloadstylesheet on xslt tasks
• RFE 1796007 Refactor of related links HTML for specialized processing
• Bug fix 1955211 Footnotes-by-reference rendered naively
• Bug fix 1900429 Inconsistent stylesheets for topics and index files in XHTML
• Bug fix 1803199 XHTML: Add class to generated <pre>

Items under development in the current iteration

Milestone 2 has an anticipated release date of late June. In addition to maintenance fixes, it will include support for the following DITA 1.2 items:

• Support for spaces in file and directory names (RFE 1982567) RFE 1982567 design

Items for future DITA-OT 1.5 iterations:

All DITA 1.2 items are available for consideration. The details of each OASIS Item listed below are at ImplementationStatus1.2, although the items may be revised as they are added to the draft specification.

• OASIS Item 12007: Keyref. Major item, should probably be broken down into several pieces.
• OASIS Item 12008: Constraints. Expect impact on conref, generalization
• OASIS Item 12010: Topic and domain integration: Expect impact on conref, generalization
• OASIS Item 12011: More general task: likely no impact apart from support for constraints and inclusion of new DTD/Schema
• OASIS Item 12013: Conref range: large impact on conref processors (ready for design)
• OASIS Item 12014: Delayed conref resolution: unsized impact on conref processors (ready for design) Note: DTD for topic prologs not ready
• OASIS Item 12015: Conref push: unsized impact on conref processors (ready for design)
• OASIS Item 12020: New text element, support with fallthrough as text
• OASIS Item 12021: sectiondiv and bodydiv: support two new block elements
• OASIS Item 12026: New glossary type: processing to support surface form of acronyms when appropriate
• OASIS Item 12031: Controlled values: support new markup used to validate content of attributes
• OASIS Item 12036: Support new scaling attribute on images
• OASIS Item 12043: draft-comment in shortdesc, body, conbody.
• OASIS Item 12048: Add header rows to reltables
• OASIS Item 12050: Support for new linking attributes in new places (ready for design)
• OASIS Item 12050a: Support for new element longdescref (ready for design)
• OASIS Item 12055: May need to update 'mapref' behavior
• OASIS Item 12060: Support for new referencing element <coderef> (ready for design)

• OASIS Learning Subcommittee work: make plugin available
• OASIS Machine Industry work: make plugin available

New items for consideration, unrelated to OASIS

• Improved JavaDoc in source code
• Easier (possibly graphical) install
• Easy to use sample style overrides
• Common interfaces for calling builds, when for products that imbed the toolkit
• XSLT 2.0 support
• Simple interface for setting parameters when running a build