Action item completed, review of Model Profile column in Chapter 6

[Robert Orosz <roboro@AUTO-TROL.com>]

Lofton,

This (lengthy, I'm afraid) report completes an Action Item that I undertook
to review the Model profile column of the PPF for accuracy. For reference,
this is the email where I raised the question about the accuracy of that
column in the PPF.

http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/cgmo-webcgm/200508/msg00052.html

In short, I found a mess. There are obsolete tables, tables with missing
rows, etc. The good news is that I think it is a manageable mess. I don't
believe that I've found any substantial problems beyond what we've already
discussed. It's mostly a matter of getting the language updated to the
current version of the Model profile. In some cases it is even simpler than
that, I've also flagged some style differences, e.g. Bold Italic text in the
original Model profile showing up as plain text, etc.

First though, I have some comments relating to our HTML formatted version of
the PPF.

1) The deprecated bgcolor attribute is used on the TD element to generate
the black color that marks the top of each row in the Model profile column
of the PPF. Purists might object to this. If so, another style could be
added to the local style element to handle this. I could not find a way to
get Amaya to add the bgcolor attribute, and I had to edit the file by hand
to add it where I needed it. The rest of the editing was done in Amaya, as
explained below.

2) Some of the Model profile information in the current Model profile is in
tables; i.e. a table inside the PPF cell. In the HTML version, this is free
form and difficult to read, especially with proportional fonts. I've have
made notes where this occurs, however, I don't know enough about HTML (i.e.
if nested tables are allowed) to propose a solution.  In any case, I believe
this only occurs where WebCGM 2.0 differs from the Model profile; i.e. users
won't have to read the Model profile column to get the WebCGM 2.0
requirements. We can probably leave this alone.

3) The current Model profile uses the ballot box with check (U+2611) and
ballot box characters to indicate the Model profile requirement (Required,
Permitted or Prohibited) and possible alternatives. In the HTML version,
these characters are replaced with "Yes," and "No" respectively. I presume
this was done so that the Latin-1 character set could be used in the HTML
file. However, this initially caused me some confusion because my brain
turned these into attributes with an implied and operator between them
(because they are all listed). Consider this:
ColourClass: Required Yes; Permitted No;
Huh? How can something be required, and yet at the same time not permitted??
I propose an additional explanatory paragraph in Section 6.1. You'll see it
in the attachment.

Finally, my report. I used Amaya to edit the HTML version of CD2. I marked
my changes with the .editorial style. It doesn't show up as well as the
.issue style, but there was already text that used the .issue style. I
wanted to avoid confusion. I then converted the edited HTML into PDF, so
that I could attach additional explanatory comments. In particular, there
are summary notes at the beginning of each section.

Disclaimer: Along the way, I noticed some mistakes in columns 1 and 2, and
corrected them appropriately. However, my review focused on column 3, so I
did not do a comprehensive review of columns 1 and 2. There will be places
where text in column 2 needs to be updated to match the updated Model
profile text in column 3.

Regards,

Rob

 <<WebCGM20-Profile.pdf>>

WebCGM20-Profile.pdf