RE: [chairs] Re: Publication templates

["Kristen Eberlein" <keberlein@sdl.com>]

Mary,

I find this unacceptable. The Technical Committees *must* have a proper specification about OASIS requirements for work artifacts available to them.

Providing Microsoft Office and OpenOffice templates for TCs that want to use them is nice touch, and I am glad that you and your staff are able to do this work.

But those templates *must* conform to an official OASIS document -- perhaps even a specification, as Norm suggested -- that outlines the conventions (font, page size, headers, footers, etc.) that OASIS work artifacts must follow.


Best regards,
Kris
Secretary, OASIS DITA Technical Committee

Kristen James Eberlein l DITA Architect and Technical Specialist l SDL Structured Content Technologies Division l (t) + 1 (919) 682-2290 l keberlein@sdl.com
 
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-----Original Message-----
From: Mary McRae [mailto:mary.mcrae@oasis-open.org] 
Sent: Monday, December 13, 2010 11:32 AM
To: Norman Walsh
Cc: members@lists.oasis-open.org; chairs@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [chairs] Re: Publication templates

Hi Norm,

  There is not. The "normative", if you will, are the Word and OpenOffice templates. 

Mary




On Dec 13, 2010, at 11:23 AM, Norman Walsh wrote:

> Mary McRae <mary.mcrae@oasis-open.org> writes:
>>  The DocBook templates for Standard Track Work Products live at
>> http://docs.oasis-open.org/templates/DocBook/spec-0.5/ and were
>> prepared by Ken Holman with help from several members of various TCs
>> who are using DocBook as their authoring platform. The package
>> includes everything needed. Any questions about its use should be
>> directed to Ken with the understanding that he's a volunteer and may
>> not be able to respond immediately.
> 
> I've seen those, and I greatly appreciate the time and energy that Ken
> has put into providing them.
> 
> That said, I find them unsatisfactory in some regards. They are based
> on DocBook V4.x and an older set of XSLT 1.0 stylesheets.
> 
> Also, it's not clear to me that the template includes support for all
> of the new document types introduced in the process: committee
> specification drafts, public review drafts, and specs; candidate OASIS
> standards, OASIS standards, approved errata, committee note draft,
> committee note public review draft (!? see other message), and
> commitee note.
> 
> Of course, since I can't find a formal publication specification for
> any of these formats, I could be mistaken.
> 
>>  The DITA TC has been working on a similar environment but it is not
>> yet ready/packaged and therefore not yet made available to a wider
>> audience.
> 
> I find this a somewhat puzzling approach. Suppose I have editable
> markup in some other XML format? Surely the TC Administrator does not
> want to be responsible for every conceivable XML vocabulary that I
> might use to edit an OASIS Specification?
> 
> Is there not a set of publication specs for the various document types
> described in the process? If not, how can you *tell* if a document
> conforms to them?
> 
>                                        Be seeing you,
>                                          norm
> 
> -- 
> Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com> | Noble patterns must be fetched here and
> http://nwalsh.com/            | there from single persons, rather than
>                              | whole nations, and from all nations,
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