Re: Election Reporting

[Tim Bovee <tbovee@ap.org>]

Thom,

> ... I would think
> that the content of the announcements (the data they contain) would be
> exactly - or almost exactly - the same, regardless of who is reporting the
> election results. The only exception to this, I would imagine, is that news
> services may wish to report only a subset of the data which election
> officials report. If this is true, then I would think that the reporting
> subset of EML would be presentation-neutral and news-source-neutral. Each
> news source could then have a standard transformation engine to convert the
> EML report into their own, customized format. ...

I agree. My question was aimed (somewhat obliquely) more at the issue of
news industry acceptance of whatever standard comes out of this
committee. 

The election tables now sent by news companies fall under the ANPA
standard, which is basically 7-bit ASCII with some characters redefined
to provide typesetter functions, and with the layout of the table
approximating what appears in a newspaper column. They are oriented
toward presentation rather than content, although they are routinely
parsed into tables by recipients.

Probably not very useful to post them here. At some point, when we're
closer to tackling the reporting section, I'll circulate a DTD that
shows the fields we now provide.

Regards,

Tim
-- 
Tim Bovee, Director of Projects/Technology
The Associated Press, Washington
202-776-9465, tbovee@ap.org