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Subject: DOCBOOK: DocBook Technical Committee Meeting Minutes: 17 Sep 2002
DocBook Technical Committee Meeting Minutes: 17 Sep 2002
=======================================================
| The DocBook Technical Committee met on Tuesday, 17 September 2002
| at 01:00p EDT (10:00a PDT, 17:00GMT, 18:00BST, 19:00CEST, 02:00JST+)
| for 90 minutes.
|
| Agenda
|
| 1. Roll call
Present:
Paul Grosso
Dennis Evans (:15-)
Dick Hamilton
Nancy (Paisner) Harrison (:10-)
Richard Lander
Sabine Ocker
Michael Smith (-:30?)
Tim Teebken
Norman Walsh
Regrets:
Bob Stayton
| 2. Accepting the minutes[1] of the previous meeting
Accepted.
| 3. Review of the agenda
None.
| 4. Review of open action items {5 min}
|
| a. Bob to write a more detailed proposal for instance-based generated xref text
Completed[2]
ACTION: Norm to put on the agenda for the next meeting
| b. Bob to investigage RFE #558443 include storage info in metadata
Completed[3]
ACTION: Norm to post a solution that uses existing metadata
| c. Norm to construct some sort of IPR template
Completed[4].
ACTION: Norm to put on the agenda for the next meeting
| d. Dick to experiment with SiberSafe for help authoring background
Continued.
| e. Norm to follow-up on RFE 473365: Allow optional in funcprototype
Completed[5].
| f. Norm to follow-up on RFE 562343: <packagename> element
Continued.
| g. Norm to post combined table markup for CALS+HTML
Continued.
| h. Nancy to summarize what DITA and TEI have to say about general principles
| for adding new markup
NP:
TEI does it like we do: define things in PEs and classes, recommend
that people modify things by redefining existing things or suppressing
elements. Like DocBook, they say if you do anything outside this we
can't promise that tools will work.
Darwin is different, they expect people to create domains and topics.
Domains are the hierarchical models. Topics are their basic element
category. So you can modify and customize either by adding a domain
specialization and putting the constituents together differently or
you can extend a topic definition. They restrict you to using the
existing building blocks. You can extend a topic, but it has to be
stuff that's already there. They don't let you create new elements
that don't already have content that's there. There's more flexibility
in creating new domains. They have an API domain, but you could create
a specific object-oriented API domain. That would be fine because a
method would use existing topics.
TEI and Darwin differ in that they've already modularized the gross
structural level so that instead of having a single basic DTD they
have a set of them. For example, TEI has base and a few different
hierarchies and they expect people to come up with some more. This
does make it easier for people to think about modification, becauase
you're starting with something that isn't so large.
| i. Norm to put principles for new markup the agenda for next month.
Completed.
| j. Richard to provide some concrete examples of what might need to be added
| for HTML Help
Continued.
| k. Sabine to provide some concrete examples for HTML Help
Continued.
| l. Norm to check with submitter on RFE #571998
Completed[6].
| m. Paul to investigate what the content model for a bidi element needs to be
| and why simply using a nested phrase is insufficient (or is it?).
Completed[7].
ACTION: Norm to put on the agenda for a decision next month
| n. Norm to investigate namespace convention in MathML Module (RFE #582705)
Continued.
| o. Norm to post solution for RFE #582822 for discussion
Completed.
| p. Norm to publish SVG Module
Completed[8].
| q. Norm to republish simplified ToC proposal
Continued.
| r. Norm to propose solution to submitter of RFE #473365
Completed[9].
| 5. Next meetings
|
| Our next telcon is 15 Oct 2002. Need to update the reservation beyond October.
ACTION: Sabine follow-up in email when Sun's hosting is resolved.
| Is anyone going to be at XML 2002?
Apparently just Norm.
| 6. What about "this version" markup
Obsoleted by Bob's action item "b."
| 7. Simplified 1.0
We're now in a one-month countdown. If no bug reports are received in
a month, we'll make it 1.0 officially.
| 8. Priciples for new markup
NW: In addition to new markup principles, I've been working on a tool
that may let us generate the various schema versions from a single
master "meta" source. More updates as I have them.
RL: Microsoft is only interested in W3C XML Schema implementation. We
took a look at the existing implementation and decided to reimplement
it using our own methodology.
RL: There's a lot of interest in making this information public, but
we haven't pursued that yet. I'll probably have news before the next
meeting.
NW: I'm not surprised that a different methodology was chosen.
ACTION: Norm to put schema discussion on the agenda for next month. RL
will attempt to get the Microsoft Schema published before the next
meeting.
NP: I'm impressed with TEI and Darwin. It would be really nice to
divide up hierarchies so that at we have, for example, and Article
module that includes the stuff articles need and then other modules
wouldn't include that stuff.
DE: I would like to have different content models in different contexts.
NP: If we provided guidelines for getting into DocBook for the five or
ten most common things that people need to do with it or the five or
ten most common critical tasks, I think that would be very helpful.
TT: This sounds a lot like the pagetype discussions that we were
having before.
NP: What I'm thinking of is supplying the outer shells. So instead of
just DocBook, we'd have the article, api, command line, and html help
DTDs.
NW: I've never seen this work very well in practice. I'd love to see
some examples.
DE: I'd like to have RefEntry be a subset all the way down to the
individual elements.
NW: I'd like to see some examples of that too.
RL: As part of my work, I've been exploring this issue. When I get
around to publishing this work and some of the related documentation,
I think it'll be some of the stuff we're looking for. One thing that
came to mind was the work [Norm] has done on Website.
NP: One possibility is for us to try purging them. Not actually
purging them, but add another module that is the simplified inlines.
Just 10 or 11 inlines and say when you do something simple, you can
just pick that group.
ACTION: NW to post more detail about the PE reorganization with some
documentation.
NP: I think many people would find simplicity more compelling than
completeness.
DH: Another thing we might think about is the fact that having subsets
is important and we could work with vendors and tools suppliers to
make subsets that work for tools and environments. You wouldn't need
to change the DTD at all, just configure the tool.
SO: I think it's the ramp-up that's intimidating. Access to all of
DocBook is overwhelming. To make it easier to figure out what sorts of
subsets of elements are required to achieve the functionality that you
need.
| 9. Discuss Help Authoring
Continued pending action items.
| 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.
|
| 598994 arg vs option
DE: There is room for confusion. Doing cmdsynopsis is hard for an
author. I don't think this is something we could easily rewrite to
make it easier.
DE: Option and optional are only similar in spelling, they have
completely different meanings.
ACTION: Norm to write better documentation. Post for discussion.
ACTION: DE to find out if he can post the internal style guide
documentation on this issue.
| 606071 allow glossary in place of glossdiv
Explain that it would complicate processing. You really only want to
go down one level and that's not possible if you make it recursive.
Rejected.
| 609061 Add new Step sibling element Alternative
SO: Steps have the semantic of being sequential, so the thought was that branch
would be less semantically confusing.
NP: I assume the content module would be like itemizedlist.
SO: No, the content model of branch is the same as step.
RL: If you think about W3C XML Schema, you have sequences and choices and it
seems like this is more-or-less what we're talking about.
NW: I think that's what we get here: procedures contain a sequence of steps,
altenatives allows one to choose among several branches.
NP: Alternatives to first step?
SO: Yes.
PG: If procedures are sequences, and alternatives are choices, why call the
thing inside branch?
SO: I think it could be inferred from the content model, but the group that
made this request thinks its ambiguous and confusing to writers.
RL: That's like saying people get confused if they have multiple folders with
the same name.
PG: And we already have 'title' reused all over the place.
NP: But these are the same thing, and using a different name confuses the issue.
DE/SO: They aren't the same.
NW: Maybe a couple of straw polls will help us settle the issues.
Poll 1: The proposal as written attempts to prevent alternatives from occurring
recursively (that is, a step with alternatives occurring as a descendent of some
other alternative step). Are you in favor of allowing or excluding alternatives:
Allow: 4, Exclude: 2, Abstain: 3
Poll 2: Are you in favor of using 'branch' or 'step' inside 'alternatives':
Branch: 2, Step: 3, Abstain: 3
NW: Not very useful.
We seem to have general approval of the idea; we need to work out the
details. Take it to email.
| The following RFEs have been moved to the bottom of this agenda in order
| to make sure that all RFEs get fairly discussed.
|
| 514435 Allow reference within refentry
Mike: can you summarize where this issue stands?
| 558443 include storage info in metadata
Closed. Use existing elements.
| 564776 process/service/daemon/server markup
ACTION: Norm to find record of previous discussion. Didn't we fall back on systemitem?
Adjourned.
| 565716 URL and URN markup
| 565905 Add xrefstyle attribute
| 570068 Online values for pubwork
| 571996 Add 'namespace' inline element
| 571998 Add 'default' inline element
| 573419 Add bidirectional text overrides
| 573812 Allow blockinfo on blockquote
| 574880 Add annotation element
| 582705 Namespace convention for MathML Module
| 582822 VARARG and FUNCDEF together
|
| The following RFEs are awaiting action items
|
| 431411 RFE 70: add generic linking capability
| 472229 Allow HTML tables
| 522552 Add title attribute to <ulink> element
| 413389 Enhance METHODNAME and VARNAME
| 436067 splitting tech.char.class
| 473365 Allow optional in funcprototype
| 482818 Simplify ToC content model
| 562343 <packagename> element
| 565637 Associate non-inline image with link
|
| The following RFEs are identified as V6.0 or later
|
| 531851 Remove inline person name elements
| 532088 Remove RevHistory from qandaentry
|
| [1] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-tc/200208/msg00002.html
[2] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-tc/200209/msg00000.html
[3] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-tc/200207/msg00010.html
[4] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-tc/200209/msg00005.html
[5] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook/200209/msg00152.html
[6] http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=571998&group_id=21935&atid=384107
[7] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook/200208/msg00172.html
[8] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook/200209/msg00145.html
[9] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook/200209/msg00152.html
Be seeing you,
norm
--
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com> | Where are you dying
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | tonight?--Evelyn Waugh
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee |
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