DocBook Technical Committee Meeting Minutes: 17 March 2004 ============================================================= The DocBook Technical Committee met on Wednesday, 17 Mar 2004 at 05:00p EST (02:00p PST, 22:00GMT, 22:00BST, 23:00CEST, 07:00JST+, 03:30a India+) for 90 minutes. 1. Attendees: Steven Cogorno, Gary Cornelius, Adam Di Carlo, Paul Grosso, Dick Hamilton, Scott Hudson, Mark Johnson, Jirka Kosek, Larry Rowland, Michael Smith, Robert Stayton, Norman Walsh Absent: Nancy Harrison 2. Accepted the minutes[1] of the previous meeting 3. Next meeting: 21 April 2004. No regrets. 4. Review of the agenda. No additions. 5. Review of open action items a. Mike to provide a better proposal for choicelist markup. CONTINUE. b. Mike to reconsider the annotation problem and post his thoughts. CONTINUE. c. Norm to add and remap attribute to simplified DocBook. CONTINUE. d. Dick to examine the use of alt, possibly as part of the annotation discussion. CONTINUE. e. Bob to test HTML tables in 4.3. COMPLETED. 6. Any response from OASIS to Norm's letter about Kavi? [2] OASIS is developing a requirements document for a new document management system. The requirements have been discussed on the chairs mailing list. ACTION: Norm will summarize the document and discussion. There was some discussion of docbook.org and the DocBook SourceForge site about consolidating DocBook standards documents and tools onto one site. It is something the SourceForge development team could discuss. 7. DocBook V4.3 CR3 No new bugs reported, and Bob completed some testing of HTML tables. Mark pointed out that when it is released in a Debian package it will get a lot more testing. The group decided to not wait. Bob pointed out that the reference pages on docbook.org for the new elements are not complete, Mike asked if a flattened version of the DTD could be included (see agenda item 7b). The committee approved the release of the 4.3 DTD. ACTION: Norm to publish the 4.3 DTD as an official committee specification, in both XML and SGML forms. ACTION: Norm to complete the reference pages for the new 4.3 elements on the docbook.org site. 7b. Additional forms of the 4.3 DTD. The group decided that it would publish only the XML and SGML DTDs as the normative standard. We would also permit the publishing of other formats as non-normative. ACTION: Norm to publish these unofficial versions - RelaxNG XML version - RelaxNG compact syntax version - W3C XML Schema - flattened version of the XML DTD 8. DocBook V5.0 (RELAX NG) Norm reported that the RelaxNG version of 5.0 is complete, and he has been using it. He reported that the Trang conversion tool has less flexibility when generating DTDs than XML Schemas. The DTD that comes out will be flat, lacking parameter entities, and thus will not be as easy to customize. Nor will one be able to port an existing customization layer, or customize with PEs in the internal subset the way you can now. Mike suggested that people customize the RelaxNG version and rengenerate the DTD. Norm wrote a paper with Sebastian Rahtz to enable merger of TEI and DocBook elements. ACTION: Norm to post a reference to the paper. Will there be a 4.4 DTD before 5.0? The committee left that as a possibility, depending on whether it was needed and when 5.0 would be ready. 9. biblioref proposal [3] (formerly Improved citation support, RFE 810932). Additional replies for consideration [4] [5] The committee reviewed the latest proposal. [10] The committee changed some of the attribute names to be more consistent: # define new biblioref element biblioref = element biblioref { biblioref.attlist } biblioref.attlist &= attribute linkend { xsd:IDREF }, attribute endterm { xsd:IDREF }?, attribute units { xsd:token }?, attribute begin {xsd:token }?, attribute end { xsd:token }?, attribute xrefstyle { xsd:token }? The renderas attribute was changed to xrefstyle because it is so similar to the xrefstyle in the xref element. It will be CDATA rather than enumerated values because the group felt it was not possible to cover everyone's needs with a fixed list of values. The documentation will include a list of suggested values, and a stylesheet will ultimately determine which values are supported in a given environment. 10. Reconsider the policy for backwards incompatible changes. The current practice is that backwards incompatible changes to the DTD are to be described one full release before they are released. That is, any such changes for 5.0 should have been commented on in version 4.0. However, version 4.0 was released in May 2000, almost four years ago. The changes due to converting to RelaxNG could not have been anticipated then. Norm proposed a one-time exception to the process for 5.0 because it will change the validation process significantly. The committee approved. The group felt it was important to help those using version 4 to prepare for the eventual release of 5.0 by publicizing the development. ACTION: Norm to produce a draft spec of 5.0. 11. Revisit addition of 'language' attribute to programlisting and synopsis (use MIME?). See [6] for the original RFE 798616. See [7] for the minutes of the decision. See [8] and [9] for further discussion about it. The committee discussed adding a 'syntax' attribute, but declined because of potential confusion with the 'language' attribute. Norm suggested that MIME types could be used to indicate both language and syntax in a 'language' attribute, using the well-known MIME standard. The commitee decided to close the RFE with no action. 12. Generalizing programlisting (Steve). Steve got a lukewarm response to his posting about changing the name of programlisting. There was no strong demand to change it, and no clear benefit for such a significant backwards incompatible change. Mike suggested adapting the textdata element to support the request. ACTION: Bob to add using textdata to the next agenda (near the top). 13. Review of Requests for Enhancement Ran out of time. Norm suggested we allocate time at the next meeting. 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 543064 JavaObject tag 675024 form, script, applet support 698026 cannot embed within 702185 add procedure as child of para 711815 Tagging for subtler breaks or "pauses" within a chapter 742373 Splitting Segmented List 752632 Color control of CALS table element 798616 syntax="" or notation="" needed for code listings 828720 'spacing' attr. for 'variablelist' 882791 Allow 'procedure' within 'para' The following RFEs are awaiting action items 413389 Enhance METHODNAME and VARNAME (Norm, generic linking) 431411 RFE 70: add generic linking capability (Norm) 522552 Add title attribute to element (Mike, annotations) 541444 caption in mediaobjectco (Dick) 565637 Associate non-inline image with link (Norm, generic linking) 574880 Add annotation element (Mike) 613293 Generalize programlisting (Steve) 623524 (Re)Consider "choicelist" markup (Mike) The following RFEs are identified as V6.0 or later 531851 Remove inline person name elements 532088 Remove RevHistory from qandaentry - --- [1] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-tc/200402/msg00012.html [2] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-tc/200402/msg00013.html [3] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-tc/200311/msg00014.html [4] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-tc/200401/msg00007.html [5] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-tc/200401/msg00008.html [6] http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=798616&group_id=21935&atid=384107 [7] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook/200309/msg00037.html [8] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook/200401/msg00011.html [9] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook/200401/msg00019.html [10] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-tc/200403/msg00008.html