DocBook Technical Committee Meeting Minutes: 15 July 2009

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

DocBook Technical Committee Meeting Minutes: 15 July 2009
=============================================================

The DocBook Technical Committee met on Wednesday, 15 July 2009 at
01:00p EDT (10:00a PDT, 17:00GMT, 18:00BST, 19:00CEST, 02:00JST+,
022:30p India+) for 85 minutes.

1. Roll call

Present: Paul Grosso, Gershon Joseph, Scott Hudson, Dick
Hamilton, Nancy Harrison, Larry Rowland, Bob Stayton,
Norm Walsh.

Absent: Jim Earley, Keith Falhgren, Patricia Gee, Jirka Kosek, Corey
Leong, Dave Pawson, John Pederson, Pine Zhang

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

3. Next meeting: 19 August 2009

No regrets so far.

4. Review of the agenda.

Add new RFE 2820947 "Ability to transclude text" as 9b.

5. Review of open action items

  a. Bob to organize TDG reading after names are fixed.
  REMOVE (see agenda item 7)

  b. Jirka to add schema comparison table to DocBook 5.0 Transition Guide.
  COMPLETED

  c. Norm to work with Mary to make Publishing Subcommittee
     schema a Committee Working Draft.
  COMPLETED

  d. Norm to work with Keith and Scott to update the OASIS committee
     site to make the Publishing Subcommittee Working Draft
     publicly available.
  CONTINUE

  e. Norm to put the new backwards compatibility policy in the spec.
  CONTINUE

  f. Norm to put the new backwards compatibility policy in the
     reference documentation.
  CONTINUE

  g. Norm will update 5.1 with changes to initializer
     content model.
  COMPLETED

  h. Norm to take a look at the inlines and make a proposal
     regarding RFE 2791288.
  CONTINUE

6.  DocBook 5.0 standards update.

Norm is working with Mary to submit DocBook 5.0 as an
OASIS Standard.  It should be ready to go by the
end of this week.

7.  New edition of DocBook: The Definitive Guide 

Dick and Norm announced that O'Reilly will be publishing
a new edition of DocBook: The Definitive Guide.
Norm suggests that the committee review the
reference pages when they are ready.  He hopes to
have them ready by 1 September.

8.  Publishing Subcommittee report.

"The DocBook Publishers Schema Version 1.0" Committee Draft
specification [2] is available for review.  The review
period will end 31 August.  Scott suggests everyone read
it and provide comments.

9. Using a map for modular DocBook.

Discussion of Larry's second sample of DocBook assembly.

Norm raised concerns about the renderas attribute as well
as importing foreign content such as DITA or other schemas.
That implies some transformation process, and will the
committee specify that?

Gershon: DITA uses specializations of topicref
in the bookmap schema to indicate how a topic is to be
represented. He also pointed out that in DITA maps,
topicref can only refer to a topic element.
In DocBook assembly, any DocBook element can be 
included, and the renderas attribute allows the
author to indicate how it would be represented.

Larry: for foreign content, perhaps have a section in
the assembly that identifies a stylesheet to be used
for transforming content during the assembly.

Bob: we should separate including DocBook content (easy)
from including foreign content (harder).

Norm: transformations are defined by the implementation.
We may provide some reference implementations.

Larry: assembling a help system requires different
processing from assembling a book.

Norm: put an "outputtype" attribute on the structure element
as a whole to indicate how it should be processed overall,
and use renderas at the element level to map one element
to another.

Bob: One assembly mode is to map all referenced elements
into a valid DocBook book, so nested topics would
become sections, for example.  Another assembly mode
creates a structured TOC and processes each reference
separately (similar to the DocBook Website customization),
without assembling it into a book first.  

Larry: may use an attribute on elements to indicate
chunking level.

ACTION: Larry to create a new assembly example for next meeting.

9b.  RFE 2820947 "Ability to transclude text".

First we discussed conref since the requestor mentioned it.
Gershon and Paul described problems with implementing
conref, including hard coding references. Gershon suggested
that DITA's keyref, which uses a level of indirection,
would be more flexible.  A note from Eliot Kimber
didn't reach the list in time, so it will be reviewed
for the next meeting.

Paul: use existing standards such as XInclude with xpointer.
Creating new schemes is a whole big thing.

Bob: the xpointer scheme is not a standard, so there is no way
to include all the children of an element without including
the element itself.  That can help with the problem of duplicate
ids when importing the same content more than once.

Paul: If the children that are imported have IDs, then
the duplicate ID problem remains.

Norm: perhaps we could define some small subset of
xpointer scheme.

We will continue this item next month, referring to it
as "transclusion" rather than "conref".


10. Add topic element (RFE #2820190).

Bob described his proposal for a new topic element.
Norm said the need for a specific element for
standalone topics still exists, and this proposal 
meets the need.  Larry thought allowing some
elements to serve as containers of a sequence of
topics was a good idea. 

ACTION: Norm to create a DocBook 5 customization layer
with topic, so we can experiment.

ACTION: Bob to present the proposal to the docbook
mailing list when Norm has the customization done.


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

    RFEs to revisit for 6.0
      1907003  biblioid content model too broad  

    RFEs to be considered 
      1679665  Add better support for modular documentation  

Discussed as item 9.

      2770858  Add limited emphasis to ubiquitous inlines 
      2791288  add quote to corpauthor and gui elements 

Awaiting Norm's action item.

      2820190  add a topic element  

Discussed as item 10.

Meeting adjourned at 2:25pm EDT.
-----

[1] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-tc/200905/msg00009.html
[2] http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/specs/publishers-1.0-spec-cd-01.pdf

Bob Stayton
Sagehill Enterprises
bobs@sagehill.net