DocBook Technical Committee Meeting Minutes: 28 July 2004 | ============================================================= | | The DocBook Technical Committee met on Wednesday, 28 July 2004 at | 05:00p EDT (02:00p PDT, 21:00GMT, 22:00BST, 23:00CEST, 06:00JST+, | 02:30a India+) for 90 minutes. | | Agenda | | 1. Roll call Paul Grosso, Norman Walsh, chair and scribe Larry Rowland Dick Hamilton Nancy Harrison Gary Cornelius Scott Hudson Mark Johnson Mike Smith Regrets: Bob Stayton Adam Di Carlo Steven Cogorno Jirka Kosek | 2. Accepting the minutes[1] of the previous meeting Accepted. | 3. Next meeting: 18 August 2004. Regrets: None. | 4. Review of the agenda. Accepted. | 5. Review of open action items | | a. Mike to provide a better proposal for choicelist markup. Contined. | b. Norm to publish flattened version of the 4.3 XML DTD. Completed. | c. Norm to ask Karl about creating stable OASIS URIs. Completed. ACTION: Norm to generate web pages for 4.2, 4.3 and 4.4x | d. Larry to look into section 508 accessibility issues | with DocBook elements. Completed. | e. Adam to ask the submitter for more information. | about 950206 Nested bibliodivs Continued. | f. Norm to create official releases for Simplified DocBook 1.1, | MathML, and others that are dependent on DocBook 4.3. Completed. | g. Bob to identify elements in DocBook that correspond to | valid locations of HTML forms in HTML output. Continued. | h. Scott will investigate places where | anchor should be permitted. Continued. | i. Norm to query the mailing list about removing xml:base | from the SGML version of 4.4. Completed. | j. Norm to query the mailing list about the impact for 4.4 | of making the rules attribute in tables into CDATA, | not enumerated. Completed. | k. Mike to communicate the decision about RFE 971095 (Allow authorgroup | anywhere author is allowed) to the submittor. Completed. | 6. DTD version 4.4 beta No comments on the beta, we could promote it to CR. What about entities? Our sets are wrong, Norm is reluctant to produce another set that's the same as the W3C set. What should we do? Mike points out that it's just not that efficient to have multiple versions of these things lying around. Norm reviews the history: the only reason we ever started distributing them was that there was no other public set of XML versions of the character entities. Proposal: change the public identifiers to the W3C public identifiers, leave the system identifiers pointing into a directory under the DTD and ship bit-for-bit copies of the W3C entity sets as they existed when we released the DTD. Accepted. ACTION: Norm to produce 4.4b2 with those changes. | 7. Request for canonical URIs for Docbook DTDs. [2] | (carried forward from last month) We can have them at the OASIS site. They'll have the same pattern that they used to have before Kavi was introduce. So, 4.3 will be http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.3/docbookx.dtd for example. Proposal: In the interest of efficiency, Norm proposes that we only put real releases on the OASIS site and leave betas and CRs only on docbook.org. Accepted. | 8. DocBook namespace (Nancy) Nancy: DITA (and other vocabularies) would more easily be able to interoperate with DocBook if it was in a namespace. Paul asks about breaking every stylesheet if we put DocBook in a namespace. Norm notes that, yes, we would, but we can work around it in XSL by doing two-passes. Nancy: What's driving it is interoperability. The latest DITA mail and they seem to have a lot of concerns about the processing implications. There's some desire on the DITA side to be able to incorporate material already encoded in DocBook. Norm notes that if we were starting from scratch, we'd definitely put DocBook in a namespace. He goes on to point out some of the irregularities of the "null" namespace, including the fact that you can't distinguish it from other documents in the null namespace and the fact that you can't assign a prefix to it. Proposal: DocBook V5.0 will be in a namespace. V4.x never will. Accepted. What will that namespace be? There are serious issues about extensibility and versioning that need to be discussed in email a bit. Nancy: when we go to a namespace in the schema model, we should continue to make the DTD not look like it's in a namespace. Norm: The logical thing to do is to have the DTD version of 5.x use the default namespace and #FIXED the xmlns attribute. | 9. Annotation proposal (Mike). [3] Continued. | 10. Discuss guidelines for accepting or rejecting requests. Maybe we should try to do this in email a bit? ACTION: Mark to summarize the processes that Debian uses for this sort of thing. | 11. alt text for accessibility. | Reports from action items? Larry used the WAVE tool that WebAIM has on their website. It revealed a few issues. Larry also looked over some guidelines and checklists for Section 508 and from the W3C. - The guiicon element should provide for alt text. - Attributes on tables should provide for summary information. (Norm: We allow textobject in table for this purpose.) - Anchors that are hrefs should support a TITLE attribute. - Tables are supposed to have row and column heads that map with spans or IDs onto cells of the tables. - We're using bold and italic vs. strong and emphasis and there are a half-dozen or so elements from HTML 4.0 that we should be using. (strong, emphasis, dfn, ...) - If you're using ASCII art (literallayout), then there needs to be a summary and some way to skip past it. The short summary, though, is that it's hard to tell how close we're getting to meeting the requirements and recommendations of the accessibility groups. ACTION: Larry to write up a summary and send it in email, including links to the sites that offer tools and tests for accessibility. ACTION: Secretary to make sure that this issue appears on the Auguest agenda after we've had a chance to discuss Larry's list. | 12. html:form should be available in more places | than in %divcomponent.mix; [4] [5] | (continue to next meeting when Bob can attend?) Continued. | 13. 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 | | 950206 Nested bibliodivs Norm: Just say no. Mark/Nancy agree with norm. Norm: From the RFE, it looks like the intent is for storing a database of bibliography entries. For that application, extending DocBook seems perfectly reasonable. When the actual document bibliography is formatted, it can be made flat. Proposal: Reject. Accepted. | 973446 Replace Footnote with Annotation Reclassify as "awaiting action items" until we figure out what we're going to do with annotation markup. | 982763 Allow nested tables in td Norm: when we constructed the content model of th/td, we used tabentry.mix which excludes tables because they can't be nested in CALS. Proposal: We should extend th/td to allow nested tables. Accepted. ACTION: Norm to fix for 4.4b2. ADJOURNED. | 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 (closed?) (Dick) | 565637 Associate non-inline image with link (Norm, generic linking) | 574880 Add annotation element (Mike) | 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/200406/msg00019.html | [2] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-apps/200406/msg00084.html | [3] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-tc/200406/msg00003.html | [4] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-apps/200406/msg00081.html | [5] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook/200404/msg00032.html