DocBook Technical Committee Meeting Minutes: 16 March 2005 ============================================================= The DocBook Technical Committee met on Wednesday, 16 March 2005 at 05:00p EST (02:00p PST, 22:00GMT, 22:00BST, 23:00CEST, 07:00JST+, 03:30a India+) for 90 minutes. 1. Roll call Present: Steve Cogorno, Gary Cornelius, Paul Grosso, Nancy Harrison, Scott Hudson, Dick Hamilton, Mark Johnson, Jirka Kosek, Larry Rowland, Bob Stayton, Norman Walsh Absent: Adam Di Carlo 2. Accepted the minutes[1] of the previous meeting. 3. Next meeting: 20 April 2005 Daylight Savings Time starts. 4. Review of the agenda. Added item 12b. 5. Review of open action items a. Mike to move the test suite process so that it's a target in the tests/Makefile. REMOVE THIS ITEM. b. Norm to obtain OASIS namespace naming rules. CONTINUED. c. Norm to publish a version of the 5.0 spec before the next meeting. CONTINUED. d. Norm to add guidelines for accepting requests to email guidelines and SourceForge page. COMPLETED. e. Bob to add inline term definitions to agenda. COMPLETED. 6. DTD V5 development status. No news. 7. Annotation proposal (Mike). [2] [3] Continued from previous meeting. Discussion centered on how to associate an annotation with its target. The two alternatives are as a child of the parent target element, and using ID/IDREF from a different location. Jirka suggested that both methods could work, using the presence of an id attribute to determine the type. Others didn't want to use id for that purpose. If use an IDREFS attribute type on the annotation, it could point to multiple target IDs. What about putting an annotation as a child of one element, and associate with other elements? Some didn't like the asymmetry, since all targets logically share the annotation. Another question: when processing takes place, how does a target know it has an annotation? We could use an annotationref element to point to an annotation located elsewhere. ACTION: Bob to write up a new proposal for the annotations. 8. Inline term definitions (Norm). Continued from previous meeting. In [4] Norm proposed a new element for DocBook 5 as follows: element termdef { common.idreq.attributes, (db.all.inlines* & glossterm) } This element would support defining terms within paragraphs in a manner similar to W3C recommendations. It would be permitted in the technical.inlines group, and excluded from itself. The committee unanimously accepted this proposal. If another version of DocBook 4 is released, it would be added using DTD syntax. 9. OASIS intellectual property rights policies (Norm). Norm reported on the proposed OASIS IPR policies, suggested reading the available tutorial, and reported on some controversy about the policies. DocBook has been royalty free, and the Committee expressed support for keeping it royalty free. 10. DocBook namespaces. An email thread initiated by Jirka [5] started a discussion of how to declare DocBook namespaces for version 5. We are leaning towards URIs rather than URNs, and using docbook.org or OASIS in the names. Gary suggested a "ns." prefix, which would require obtaining an ns.docbook.org domain name if we want something to be available at the URI. This item is continued until we get the OASIS naming guidelines. 11. DocBook and Darwin Information Typing Archtecture (DITA). Paul and Nancy described DITA and how it relates to DocBook. Paul saw DITA as a separate schema that would not directly influence Docbook. Nancy suggested some transformations between DocBook and DITA are being done. The committee decided to wait for requests from users before taking any action. 12. Table model purity (Bob). Bob proposed adding four CALS table attributes to the HTML table model in DocBook 5. The attributes are: orient pgwide tabstyle floatstyle These attributes would allow HTML tables to be formatted for print output the same as CALS tables. The original HTML table model does not have these attributes because it was not page oriented. The DocBook 4 DTD cannot completely separate the table models because they share the same top level table element. In DocBook5, the table models are separate and currently don't share these attributes. Norm wants to keep the table models separate to ensure interoperability with other applications. He wants to avoid creating non-standard hybrid tables. Bob pointed out that HTML table markup in DocBook is likely to contain DOcBook elements, so it cannot be cut and pasted into HTML. A straw poll of committee members indicated an even split, with many undecided members. ACTION: Bob to add to next month's agenda for further discussion. 12b. Status of Simplified DocBook 1.1. It has been in Candidate Release for several months with no complaints. The committee accepted the proposal to make it an official release. ACTION: Norm to release official 1.1 version of sdocbook. Meeting adjourned at 6:30pm EST. ------------------------------------------------------------ 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 [No new RFEs since the last meeting] 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 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 1097183 Allow Task as a sibling of sections 1084491 Add address, orgname, orgdiv to corpauthor, corpcredit, etc. 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/200502/msg00008.html [2] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-tc/200406/msg00003.html [3] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-tc/200406/msg00005.html [4] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook/200502/msg00042.html [5] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-tc/200503/msg00000.html Bob Stayton Sagehill Enterprises DocBook Consulting bobs@sagehill.net