Re: [chairs] Re: Publication templates

[Jon Bosak <bosak@pinax.com>]

Kristen Eberlein wrote:
| 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.

Having now published several documents using (at one time or
another) the Word, OpenOffice, and DocBook OASIS document
templates, I'm not understanding the tone of desperation here.  I
didn't find the preassigned paragraph formats or order of
presentation objectionable or difficult to work with.  The visual
style is clunky compared to, say, magazine layouts, but it's
serviceable for technical documentation.  The fact that the
templates hadn't been through the OASIS standardization process
didn't make them any harder to use, or (God wot) less well
designed than if they'd been created by a committee.

The OASIS rules say that the administration gets to make up most
of this.  What's the point in adding an enormous wadge of
procedural machinery on top of it?

What's the problem here?  Is there something in particular you
don't like about the formats?  What exactly is it?

Jon