RE: Document Authoring Tool Woes

[George_Robert_Blakley_III@tivoli.com]

All,

Just to be clear,  unless I seriously misunderstood the response to the
discussion I started on the
call Friday,  the use cases & requirements subgroup has not yet made any
decision about either
what format its documents will finally be in or what tools it will use.

The interim agreement we reached, in the interests of keeping our options
open, was to use any
tool you choose, but to circulate work products in the following formats:

     text:

          Format: HTML or RTF
          Rules:    use only "body",  "heading level 1", and "heading level
2" tags (for now)

               I'd like to propose amending this by allowing you to also
use bulleted
               and numbered lists, if that's OK

     figures:

          Format: .ppt or JPEG

We did agree that the output format we'll use, whatever tools and source
formats are chosen, will
be Adobe Acrobat .pdf.

We *discussed* but *did not* decide for sure on the use of XML as the
format for the final document.
I'm still investigating tool support for this.

As I said on the call, my criteria are:

     Whatever tools and format we choose must be able to support the
following:

          numbering (at least of paragraphs; preferably of lines also, for
reference when reviewing)
          revision marks
          imbedded figures

--bob

Bob Blakley
Chief Scientist, Security
Tivoli Systems, Inc.


"Eve L. Maler" <eve.maler@east.sun.com> on 01/22/2001 09:53:16 AM

To:   security-services@lists.oasis-open.org
cc:
Subject:  RE: Document Authoring Tool Woes



At 06:08 PM 1/21/01 -0500, Orchard, David wrote:
>I suggest that you try talking with Eve about the W3C xml/xmlspec
dtd/xslt.
>When I was active at co-editing XInclude and XLink, there was a W3C DTD.
>Then each WG created it's own stylesheet.  The XLink Ben Trafford and I
>copied mostly from the Schema WG.

The XMLspec DTD is being used for many of W3C's specifications.  I have
maintained it for the past few years.  My colleague, Norm Walsh, is the
primary maintainer for the XSLT stylesheet that produces HTML output, and
html2ps was used very successfully for the XML 1.0 Second Edition spec for
producing PDF.  If you want to see samples of the DTD and its output, go
to:

   http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml

There are several free XML editors.  Most of them (like XML Spy) are really
not meant for writing prose, but there are others that work pretty well in
this respect.  I like XED, which is a simple text editor that is DTD-aware,
and emacs users could use the XML mode that's out there.  Check out the
following XML portal for a list of free XML editors:

   http://www.startkabel.nl/k/xml/

>Images were created in whatever, then saved as gif.

I think standardizing on GIF or JPEG would work just fine.

>You also might want to check with other Oasis TC's to see if Oasis has
>developed an OASIS Spec DTD/Schema.  If not, you could be in
ground-breaking
>territory!  Imagine, you could kick-off the standard that other OASIS tc's
>use.

A few months back, I was in discussions with some OASIS, W3C, and IETF
people to see about making a more generic version of XMLspec for use in
other standards development organizations.  I never went through with it,
but it would be trivial to remove the W3C-specificity out of XMLspec, and I
bet I could convince Norm to modify his stylesheet to (e.g.) stick the
OASIS logo in there.

My strong preference is to use XML for our specifications, and I'm willing
to do some work to help this happen.  It means a little more hassle and
initial discomfort with the tools, but it's nothing compared to passing
around proprietary file formats that some people have problems with (I have
to admit that StarOffice sometimes does a bad job with Word files that have
embedded graphics), and it just looks really bad to use something
proprietary. :-)  However, I will leave this matter up to Bob Blakley and
the other editors to decide (perhaps the discussion should be carried on in
the security-editors list...).

         Eve
--
Eve Maler                                          +1 781 442 3190
Sun Microsystems XML Technology Center    eve.maler @ east.sun.com