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Subject: DOCBOOK: DocBook TC Meeting Minutes: 21 May 2002
/ Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com> was heard to say:
| DocBook Technical Committee Meeting Agenda: 21 May 2002
| =======================================================
The DocBook Technical Committee met on Tuesday, 21 May 2002 at
01:00p EDT (10:00a PDT, 17:00GMT, 18:00BST, 19:00CEST, 02:00JST+)
for 90 minutes.
| Agenda
|
| 1. Roll call
Dennis Evans [-2:10]
Dick Hamilton
Nancy Harrison [:30]
Mike Smith
Bob Stayton
Tim Teebken (Provisional)
Norman Walsh
Regrets:
Paul Grosso
Sabine Ocker
Called to order at 13:06 EDT.
| 2. Accepting the minutes[1] of the previous meeting
Accepted.
| 3. Review of the agenda
Added 9b.
| 4. Review of open action items {5 min}
|
| a. Norm to write a concrete proposal for linking in DocBook 5.0
| Continued.
| b. Dick to compare his internal customizations to the last HelpSet proposal[2]
Completed.
| c. Nancy to review DITA for help authoring and summarize.
Continued.
| d. Norm to consider scheduling for 4.3, 5.0, 6.0 etc.
| Continued.
| e. Norm and Paul to take up offline the particular issues of how
| to do the HTML/Table customization.
| Continued.
| f. Mike to provide a list of use cases to motivate discussion of annotations
| Completed[3][4]
| g. Norm to float 'optionalparamdef'/'optionalmethodparam' on the list and
| see if other people are having similar problems.
| Completed[5]
| h. Norm to ask the submitter of RFE #495853 if they really want introductory
| text? If not, how do they imagine this would be rendered?
| Completed[6]
| i. Paul to report what the XHTML and XSL FO specs actually say
| about nested links.
| Completed[7]
|
| ACTION: Norm to follow-up on g. for the June meeting
| ACTION: Norm to follow-up on h. for the June meeting
|
| 5. Release DocBook V4.2CR2? {5 min}
Fix two PEs. Fix the error condition for xml.features and sgml.features.
Proposed: Release CR2 and restart the 30 day counter. Accepted.
| 7. Discuss options to control per-instance generated text on xref {15 min}
Bob: Right now there's one redering for each xref (per element). For a
reference to a chapter, for example, should it say "Chapter 5, Chapter
Title". Sometimes it will have the page number, etc. There are some
cases where always using the same style doesn't work very well from a
writing perspective.
PIs could be used, but will the PIs surive?
See e.g., Feature Req #451011[8]
There seems to be general agreement that this is a problem that would
benefit from a common solution.
ACTION: Bob to write an RFE.
| 9. Discuss Annotations {15 min}
Paul had strong opinions on this issue, it would be a shame to discuss
it at length in his absence.
Proposed: postpone for June. Accepted.
9b. XML Character entities
Mike: Looking at some Linux distributions and a distribution for the
CygWin system, I noticed that they are distributing another version of
the character entity files. Nobody should be tampering with those
files, they should just be using the standard versions distributed at
the OASIS DocBook site.
We should come up with some mechanism for clearly identifying the
files (internally) and indicate that they should not be changed.
ACTION: Mike to file an bug report against the character entities.
ACTION: Norm to review the status of the XML Character Entities document.
ACTION: Norm to identify the questionable mappings and fix outstanding bugs.
| 8. Discuss Help Authoring {10 min}
Dick: comparing HP's internal work to the HelpSet proposal, they're
very similar in the core. The things that are different may not be
appropriate for DocBook:
- Markup optimizations to simplify the stylesheets
(An element that says where a pointer to the glossary goes, for example)
- We provide an explicit hierarchy; rather than a single HelpSet with an
automatically generated TOC; we have independent items and an explicit,
hand-generated TOC.
ACTION: Tim to contact a representative from Microsoft to discuss help authoring
Nancy: Still working on understanding DITA, in particular
"specialization". Specialization is the way that they point data at a
particular domain. So a command reference page or programming or
business applications could all be specializations.
There's a lot that does correspond. I can't think of any particular structure
that I couldn't find some place in DITA. The very strong difference is the way
that they modularize things.
DocBook has a few modules (hierarchy, pool, notations); DITA creates a
few different hierarchies and breaks up the pool of data considerably.
Rather than have a single pool, they have one set of elements that's
more for an API Ref and another that's for books. They also have one
set that's all about formatting. They have about a dozen DTDs.
They have topics, but then they have more specialized things (like books) in
other places.
Somewhat orthogonally, they have the concept of "information types":
tasks, concepts, references, and general topic.
It doesn't appear to me that having one of those dictates any internal
structure.
Mike: except perhaps for the procedure (task?) topic that's much more
complex than the DocBook procedure model.
Nancy: my first derivation is that the biggest difference is in how
they break out the parts. This makes it possible to subset whole
groups more easily.
Naming is very clearly HTML derived.
I'm still in process with the investigation and it isn't done yet.
We don't have a task- or topic-oriented markup style. They're
elevating things like "procedures" to a stand-alone thing at the level
of a "refentry" in DocBook. This is a perspective that we probably
really want to look at in terms of how we would like to modularize
DocBook. What things are likely to be standalone?
We want to be aware of the parts of DocBook that are likely to be used
standalone.
| 10. Review of Requests for Enhancement {40 min}
|
| 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
|
| where XXXX is the RFE number.
|
| 488368 Simplify single index entries
Norm: I'm not moved by the verbosity problems. And entities are a
perfectly good solution.
Mike: I feel the same way.
Dick: I'd feel more comfortable if you got some more benefit beyond fewer keystrokes.
Proposed: Reject request. Accepted.
| 507975 revision should allow author
Proposed: Accept. Accepted.
| 514244 Allowing xref inside link
Postponed: pending further refinement of the generalized linking proposal.
| 514425 Simplify info elements
ACTION: Norm to ask for opinions on the list. Particularly to see if
anyone has ever used the subsetting facility that we provide.
ACTION: Norm to ask if the relative ordering of info elements and
titles is an issue. In particular, is fixing it worth the
backwards-incompatibility hit.
| 514435 Allow reference within refentry
Nancy: we allow deeply nested refsects for this purpose. So that
subsidiary reference information could be placed in a single refentry.
Mike: perhaps he could provide a more complete example of the problem,
or how a new reflist element would work.
ACTION: Mike to follow-up with the submitter for more detail.
| 517604 Optional Title for GlossList
Proposed: Accept this. Accepted.
| 518074 More database classes
Proposed: Accept this proposal with the addition of "secondarykey".
Accepted.
Out of time. Meeting adjourned at 14:32 EDT.
| 531851 Remove inline person name elements
| 532088 Remove RevHistory from qandaentry
| 533734 Allow methodsynopsis not to have paramet
| 558443 include storage info in metadata
|
| The following RFEs have been moved to the bottom of this agenda in order
| to make sure that all RFEs get fairly discussed.
|
| 413389 Enhance METHODNAME and VARNAME
| 425730 Create an SVG module
| 431411 RFE 70: add generic linking capability
| 436067 splitting tech.char.class
| 482818 Simplify ToC content model
| 522552 Add title attribute to <ulink> element
|
| [1] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-tc/200204/msg00010.html
| [2] http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=9352&group_id=21935
| [3] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-tc/200205/msg00004.html
| [4] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-tc/200205/msg00005.html
| [5] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook/200205/msg00078.html
| [6] http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&group_id=21935&atid=384107&aid=473365
| [7] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-tc/200204/msg00011.html
[8] http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=451011&group_id=21935&atid=373750
Be seeing you,
norm
--
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com> | To what excesses will men not go
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | for the sake of a religion in
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee | which they believe so little and
| which they practice so
| imperfectly!--La Bruy\`ere
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