formatting rules

[Jacob Westfall <jake@jpw.biz>]

Hi,
	I have some feedback on a particular part of the ECIG formatting rules for IPAWS Profile messages and so am copying both the Oasis SC and the ECIG comments email.  I'd like to see the formatting rules revisited at some point and so this particular point could be added to the review list.

The content of the description and instruction elements is truncated if its longer than 100 words.  So there is a note in the Profile that says an issuer should put important info at the beginning to accomodate this.  We've recently run into the situation that the issuer wants to control where this truncation occurs.  They have both important and supplemental info that are being put into the description element and want the truncation to happen at a certain point, rather than just at the 100 words mark which may pick up a fragment of the supplemental info instead leading to some potential confusion.

For example, a weather alert may have important information about the storm event as a beginning paragraph in the description followed by several paragraphs with forecast info and some boilerplate.  The storm paragraph may end at 65 words long.  Since an ellipsis was being used to denote when truncation of content has taken place, the suggestion was raised that an issuer could use an ellipsis or other delimiter to indicate a more suitable point for truncation.

This of course brings up concerns about the wisdom of parsing within elements and unintentional use of the delimiter, etc.  But its something to think about.

-- 
jake@jpw.biz
--