DocBook Technical Committee Meeting Minutes: 18 October 2006

["Bob Stayton" <bobs@sagehill.net>]

DocBook Technical Committee Meeting Minutes: 18 October 2006
=============================================================

The DocBook Technical Committee met on Wednesday, 18 October 2006 at
05:00p EDT (02:00p PDT, 21:00GMT, 22:00BST, 23:00CEST, 06:00JST+,
02:30a India+) for 80 minutes.

1. Roll call

Present: Steve Cogorno, Gary Cornelius, Nancy Harrison,
Scott Hudson, Gershon Joseph, Larry Rowland, Bob Stayton,
Norman Walsh

Regrets: Paul Grosso, Jirka Kosek

On leave: Dick Hamilton

2. Accepted the minutes[1] of the previous meeting.

3. Next meeting: 15 November 2006

No regrets.  Take note of switch from daylight savings time.

4. Review of the agenda.

Accepted.

5. Review of open action items

    a.  Norm and Bob to review and close any RFEs that should be closed.
        COMPLETED

    b.  Bob to investigate what other biblio elements might
        be appropriate inline.
        COMPLETED

    c.  Norm to enhance the description of HTML table markup
        in The Definitive Guide.
        COMPLETED

    d.  Bob to add inline jobtitle to next month's agenda.
        COMPLETED

    e.  Norm to fix inlineequation to take inlinemediaobject
        in the next DB5 beta.
        COMPLETED

    f.  Norm to explain to the submittor of RFE 1557319 that
        in DB5 indexterm parents are like replaceable.
        COMPLETED


6.  DocBook 4.5 news.

DocBook 4.5 is now an official OASIS Specification!
A press release will be going out shortly.

7.  Inline jobtitle (RFE 1537424).
    See Bob's mail [2]

Bob mentioned other elements not already available
inline that might be needed inline,
such as publisher, publishername, and biblioid.
The publisher element contains publishername and
address, and no one supported making it inline.
The publishername element had more support, but not
enough to be added inline.
The biblioid element would invite other related elements
such as edition, seriesvolnums, etc., and no one wanted
to add such.

Regarding the original request, many agreed with the use case
of identifying a jobtitle such as "Database Administrator"
without associating it with a person's name.  Nancy
thought inline jobtitle was not appropriate, that it was
more like an audience metadata that should be handled
in another way.  After more discussion,
the committee voted 4 to 3 (1 abstention)
to allow jobtitle inline.

8.  Other DocBook 5 issues.

None.

Norm mentioned that if we want a Committee Specification
for 5.0 in time for the December XML conference, we will
have to approve it at the November meeting.

9.  Unfinished business: RFE 1097183: Allow Task as a sibling of sections

Much discussion about this issue.  Steve felt task was a
structure element, not a block element as currently
defined.  Some members support the RFE, some
members oppose.  Several outcomes were summarized by Norm:

a.  add task as a sibling of section (per the request).

b.  create a new "topic" structure, which would be less
sequential than the current section structure.
A book could consist of topics; a chapter could consist
of topics; some topics could be tasktopic elements with
a more restricted content model;  topics may or may
not nest.  Nancy suggested looking at this idea in a larger
context to meet more than just task needs.

c.  structural workaround, where a section with role="task"
would contain just a task element with no title (the title being
on the section).

d.  no changes.

The committee felt more discussion via email was needed.

ACTION: Norm to write email to initiate discussion
on the docbook list.

10.  Review of Requests for Enhancement

    To browse a specific RFE, enter the URL (on one line):

      http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&;;
      group_id=21935&atid=384107&aid=XXXX

      1097183  Allow Task as a sibling of sections

See agenda item 9.

      1537424  Allow Jobtitle inline

See agenda item 7.

      1568417  Duplicate Schematron rules

Bug reported by Jirka, to be fixed by Norm.

      1568419  Inverted Schematron assertion for termdef

Bug reported by Jirka, to be fixed by Norm.

      1575537  allow markup from other namespaces in info

Scott described a need to include ODRL (digital rights management)
information in its namespace in a docbook info element.
Norm described a way to allow non-docbook namespaced elements
in info, using RNG syntax (but not DTD syntax).

The committee felt more discussion via email was needed.

ACTION: Scott to write email to initiate discussion
on the docbook list.

Meeting adjourned 6:20pm EDT.

- ---

[1] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-tc/200609/msg00004.html
[2] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-tc/200610/msg00011.html


Bob Stayton
Sagehill Enterprises
DocBook Consulting
bobs@sagehill.net