DocBook Technical Committee Meeting Minutes: 20 October 2004
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The DocBook Technical Committee met on Wednesday, 20 October 2004 at
05:00p EDT (02:00p PDT, 21:00GMT, 22:00BST, 23:00CEST, 06:00JST+,
02:30a India+) for approximately 90 minutes.


1. Roll call

Present: Steven Cogorno, Adam Di Carlo, Gary Cornelius, Paul Grosso,
Dick Hamilton, Nancy Harrison, Scott Hudson, Mark Johnson,
Jirka Kosek, Larry Rowland, Bob Stayton, Norman Walsh 

Regrets: none

Absent: Mike Smith

2. Accepted the minutes[1] of the previous meeting.

3. Next meeting: originally scheduled for 17 November 2004,
   but was changed to Monday 22 November to permit more
   members to attend.

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. Norm to generate web pages for 4.2, 4.3, and 4.4x.
     DONE.

  c. Norm to release Simplified DocBook 1.1 CR2.
     Almost DONE.
 
  d. Norm to write to OASIS requesting restoration of 
     Committee Specification or equivalent.  He should 
     cite Bob's vendor example.
     DONE.
   
  e. Norm to forward Larry's mail about table accessibility.
     DONE.
   
  f. Norm to contact Mark Pilgrim, author of
     Dive Into Accessibility, about accessibility issues.
     DONE.
   
  g. Norm to produce DocBook 4.4CR1.
     DONE.


6. Status of DTD version 4.4 beta

   Norm posted 4.4CR1 in September to docbook.org, but it appears
   that the announcement did not go out, so little testing was done.
   Adam mentioned some fixes needed to some public identifiers.
   Will restart with 4.4CR2.
   
   ACTION: Norm to post 4.4CR2 very soon.

7. Committee charter.  See latest draft [2]

   With one minor editorial change to separate Fedora and Red Hat
   in the list of users, the committee adopted the new charter
   with unanimous consent.  At some future point we will need
   to consider the committee IPR policy.

8. "Committee Draft" vs. "OASIS Standard".

   Norm says, "Committee Draft" is likely to make a comeback.
   We plan to make the last version 4 DTD into an
   OASIS Standard, but we can't yet say when we will have
   the last version 4.

9. Annotation proposal (Mike).  [3] [4]
10. Accessibility.  [5] [6]

   These two agenda items were discussed together.

   Bob mentioned that the last meeting we discussed
   simple (text only) annotations and complex (block
   structures) annotations.  

   Nancy asked about parentage of annotations, and
   Norm said most places, like indexterm.

   Jirka expressed concern about a stylesheet taking the
   text value of an element and accidentally picking up
   the annotation text.  But we already have that
   problem with indexterms.

   We discussed putting them out of line, but the committee found
   that would make it too complicated for authors.

   We discussed reusing textobject, but felt it unsuitable because
   it currently is used for content such as program code.

   Many felt the short annotation was most suitable for accessibility 
   information.

   These element names were nominated:

     alt - short text-only 
     annotation - contains block elements

   A role attribute can be used to differentiate and customize
   how annotations are used.

   ACTION: Norm to recast his example implementation using these
   two element names, and will restart a discussion on the list.

   ACTION: Norm will resend Larry's table accessibility email
   again since it was sent as an empty message last month.

11. Discuss guidelines for accepting or rejecting requests.
   
    After some discussion, Larry summarized several possible guidelines:
    a.  The change is within the scope of the charter.
    b.  The change is consistent with the DocBook model.
    c.  The change is beneficial to the community of users.

    ACTION: Nancy will write up some text to be discussed
    at the next meeting.

12. Review of Requests for Enhancement

      1028583 Allow both glossee and glossdef in glossentry 

        The commitee felt the suggested change would not fit
 the stated semantics of the glossary elements.
 REJECTED.

The meeting adjourned at 5:23 EDT.
****************************************************************

     The following RFEs are awaiting action items

      973446 Replace Footnote with Annotation 
      413389 Enhance METHODNAME and VARNAME (Norm, generic linking)
      431411 RFE 70: add generic linking capability (Norm)
      522552 Add title attribute to <ulink> element (Mike, annotations)
      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 V5.0 or later

      974285 Check floatstyle/float attributes
      958393 remove default class value from productname 
      531851 Remove inline person name elements
      532088 Remove RevHistory from qandaentry
- ---

[1] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-tc/200409/msg00021.html
[2] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-tc/200410/msg00015.html
[3] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-tc/200406/msg00003.html
[4] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-tc/200406/msg00005.html
[5] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-tc/200408/msg00002.html
[6] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-tc/200408/msg00003.html

Bob Stayton
Sagehill Enterprises
DocBook Consulting
bobs@sagehill.net