Re: [emergency-cap-profiles] formatting rules

["Art Botterell" <ABott@so.cccounty.us>]

Perhaps I've missed something here, but is it possible we're back to flogging the dead horse of plugging weather-wire content into CAP?  We've already established that weather-wire content in the current WMO format doesn't insert directly into CAP very well.  But that's not the intent of the Profile.

Better than trying to control where truncation occurs, originators should be encouraged simply to get to the point in their instruction and description texts.  As long as they don't go more than 100 words... which is about ten lines of text or almost a minute of reading time, really way more than is necessary for a practical warning message... the truncation problem doesn't arise.  The truncation rules are only to handle the boundary case where some originator rambles on much longer than they should in a warning message.

- Art

>>> Jacob Westfall <jake@jpw.biz> 6/15/2009 7:10 AM >>>
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 
--

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