DocBook Technical Committee Meeting Minutes: 17 September 2008

["Bob Stayton" <bobs@sagehill.net>]

DocBook Technical Committee Meeting Minute: 17 September 2008
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The DocBook Technical Committee met on Wednesday,
17 September 2008 at 01:00p EDT (10:00a PDT, 17:00GMT,
18:00BST, 19:00CEST, 02:00JST+, 022:30p India+) for
40 minutes.


1. Roll call

Present: Jim Earley, Paul Grosso, Scott Hudson, Dick
Hamilton, Gershon Joseph, Jirka Kosek, Larry Rowland, Bob Stayton.

Absent: Gary Cornelius, Keith Falhgren,
Patricia Gee, John Hanratty,
Dave Pawson, John Pederson

Regrets: Corey Leong, Norman Walsh

2. Accepted the minutes with corrections [1] of the previous meeting.

3. Next meeting: 15 October 2008

Regrets from Gershon Joseph.

4. Review of the agenda.

No new items.

5. Review of open action items

  a. Bob to organize TDG reading after names are fixed.
     CONTINUE

  b. Dick and Jim to investigate using a map for modular DocBook.
     COMPLETED (almost)
     ACTION: Bob to add to next month's agenda.

  c. Norm to write up a backwards compatibility policy document.
     CONTINUE

  d. Gershon to communicate with JoAnne Hackos regarding adoption committee.
     CONTINUE

  e. Norm to incorporate group parameter change (RFE 1998852) into the 
schema
     for 5.1.
     CONTINUE

  f. Norm to ask mailing list about 'rep' on methodparam.
     CONTINUE

6.  DocBook TC charter review.

Norm needs to be present for this discussion, so it is postponed
to next month.

7.  DocBook 5.0 standards update

We received a third usage statement of DocBook 5, so Norm
can proceed with making it an OASIS standard.

ACTION: Bob to follow up with Norm regarding submittal to OASIS.

There was discussion about the lack of support in tools
for RelaxNG with Schematron rules, despite them both
being international standards.  Since DocBook 5's
official OASIS standard will use such a schema, there was
concern that this will hinder deployment.

Some workarounds were suggested:
 - using the DTD and adhering to authoring style rules.
 - validating documents outside the editor.
 - using XML Schema and ACL rules in Arbortext.

One question that came up was what features would be lost
if RelaxNG were supported but not Schematron rules.

ACTION: Jirka to analyze RelaxNG without Schematron.

8.  Policy for backwards compatible changes.

Postponed until Norm submits the policy document.

9.  Publishing Subcommittee report.

Scott reported that the subcommittee did not achieve quorum
at its last meeting, so the spec is not approved for
submittal to the TC yet.

10. DocBook Adoption Committee proposal.

Gershon would like to talk to JoAnn Hackos before
continuing this discussion.
Dick suggested that a paper for the XML-in-Practice 2008
conference could be submitted.

11.  Review of Requests for Enhancement

    To browse a specific RFE, enter the URL (on one line):

      http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&;;
      group_id=21935&atid=384107&aid=XXXX

    These RFEs postponed until after 5.0 release
      1097183  Allow Task as a sibling of sections
      1679665  Add better support for modular documentation
      1722935  DocBook 5: Adding proofreader in @class for othercredit?
      1770787  Rename firstname and surname
      1907003  biblioid content model too broad

    RFEs to be considered
      2021383  Is 'rep' on methodparam a mistake?

Postponed until Norm attends.

      2067915  add floatstyle attribute to sidebar

The lack of floatstyle was seen as an oversight.  APPROVED.

      2100736  initializer should allow constants

ACTION: Larry to investigate this RFE.
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[1] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-tc/200808/msg00014.html

Bob Stayton
Sagehill Enterprises
bobs@sagehill.net