[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [Elist Home]
Subject: [ubl-csc] Format for Library Content Review
As promised in the LCSC meeting last week, I have been attempting to figure out the document structure of the next Library Content (and NDR) review. We have what appear to be these two main requirements: - The document set has to be conformant (so far as it can be at this stage) with ISO guidelines. - The document has to be easy for us and our reviewers to work with. A couple of days spent trying to construct a traditional document conforming to ISO/IEC Directives, Part 3 (Rules for the structure and drafting of International Standards) with additional reference to ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2/WG 3 N 505 (Swedish view on ISO/IEC 8859 document layout) have convinced me that this it is possible to achieve both objectives, but not at the same time. The biggest problem is the spreadsheets. - They contain hidden annotations that don't show up in a printout. We will have to solve this editorially by breaking the annotations out into text that will precede the printed version of the spreadsheets. - They use colors in a semantically meaningful way. This doesn't work so well on paper unless you have a color printer, which most people don't. I don't have a good solution for this; I guess people using the printed version will just have to cope with the grayscale approximations. - They want to be displayed sideways on pages that use a separate framework for page numbering and TOC generation. This can be accomplished by creating JPEG images of each spreadsheet page, rotating the images, and pasting them into the document, but the process is not easy and results in insanely large files. One obvious solution is to convert everything to PDF and use Acrobat to assemble the document, but I will need some time to explore Acrobat's capabilities with regard to headers, footers, and TOC generation. I also believe (on general principles) that this problem can be solved by using the openoffice suite to convert everything to openoffice xml formats and working with those using emacs and perl scripts, but I will need some help from the openoffice team in figuring out how to do this. So while I believe that it is possible to create a printed ISO/IEC conformant document when we're all done and ready to move UBL into the international standardization process, it's going to take some further work to figure out how to do this, and it seems to me unlikely that the solution we finally adopt is one that we and our reviewers will find easy to work with during the design and review phases. Until we get to the place where we're ready to release UBL as a Committee Specification, therefore, I suggest that we publish the NDR and LC sets as hypertext documents that conform as closely as possible to ISO/IEC document organization guidelines but are published using HTML together with spreadsheet and drawing formats that can be worked with using free tools. The Excel spreadsheet format qualifies under this heading because the equivalent program from openoffice.org can work with it. In conformance with the ISO/IEC naming guidelines, I suggest the following official names for the pieces of this effort: Universal Business Language -- Part 1. Naming and Design Rules Universal Business Language -- Part 2. Library Content Universal Business Language -- Part 3. Context Methodology Mockups of website-resident and local versions of Part 2 (part2.htm and part2loc.htm, the latter in a zip file) are attached below. They are identical except that the website-resident version points to specific URLs on the UBL LCSC part of the site while the local version points to files bundled with the document. The URLs are fictional at this point, of course. I've used the XSD and XLS files from Gunther Stuhec's LCSC message of 20 December to partially populate the local version so that you can see how this works. I've tried for wording that enables the local version of the HTML file to be generated from the website-specific version with a single global search-and-replace on the site-specific part of the URLs. We could use the same approach to include stylesheets and case studies, but since we're not planning on releasing them synchronously with the schemas in this review cycle, I haven't bothered to include hooks for them in these mockups. Please look this over and tell me whether you think it's heading in the right direction. It would also be helpful if someone subscribed to the LCSC list could forward to the LCSC a URL to this message in the CSC archive in time for the LCSC conference call tomorrow (Monday 23 December). Jon
Attachment:
part2.htm
Description: Binary data
Attachment:
part2loc.zip
Description: Binary data
[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [Elist Home]
Powered by eList eXpress LLC