DOCBOOK: DocBook Technical Committee Meeting Minutes: 16 Apr 2002

[Norman Walsh <ndw at nwalsh dot com>]

DocBook Technical Committee Meeting Minutes: 16 Apr 2002
=======================================================

The DocBook Technical Committee met on Tuesday, 16 Apr 2002 at
01:00p EDT (10:00a PDT, 17:00GMT, 18:00BST, 19:00CEST, 02:00JST+) for
90 minutes.
 
| Agenda
| 
| 1. Roll call

  Paul Grosso
  Dennis Evans
  Nancy Harrison
  Sabine Ocker
  Mike Smith
  Bob Stayton
  Norman Walsh

Regrets:

  Dick Hamilton

Meeting called to order at 13:05 EDT.

| 2. Accepting the minutes[1] of the previous meeting

Accepted.

| 3. Review of the agenda

None.

| 4. Review of open action items {5 min}
| 
|    a. Norm to write a concrete proposal for linking in DocBook 5.0
|       Continued.
|    b. Sabine to update the teleconference service to make the telcons 90 minutes.
|       Completed.
|    c. Dick to restart the discussion of help projects on the DocBook list.
|       Completed[2]
|    d. Dick to compare his internal customizations to the last HelpSet proposal[3]
        Continued
|    e. Nancy to review DITA for help authoring and summarize.
        Continued
|    f. Paul to attempt a merged table model.
|       Completed[4]
|    g. Mike to write a proposal for some form of generic annotation mechanism.
        Completed[5]

| 5. Discuss Help Authoring {15 min}

Continued until the next meeting.

| 6. Discuss RFE #472229 Allow HTML tables {15 min}

Paul: Tried to leave the original files unchanged (some changes were
required because there are aren't enough PEs in the original files);
using the customization layer paradigm. In the long run we may want to
just put the table model in. There are only three elements that have
the same name: tgroup, thead, and tfoot. In those three cases, each
needed a content model that was the HTML model or the CALS model. And
each had to have an attribute set that was the union. In cases where
the same attributes occurred, the value spaces had to be unioned.

Proposed: we adopt this solution in principal for solving the HTML
tables in DocBook request (RFE 472229). Accepted.

Action: Norm to consider scheduling for 4.3, 5.0, 6.0 etc.

Proposed: leave aside the decision about when to do HTML tables until
after we've decided something about our schedule.

Action: Norm and Paul to take up offline the particular issues of how
to do the customization.

| 7. Discuss Annotations {15 min}

Mike: There have been a couple of different requests to provide some
way to generating text for HTML TITLE attributes (for tooltips).
Related is the ability to provide the expanded text for an acronym.
This seems to fall under the umbrella of "annotations" on text.
Footnotes are also a kind of annotation.

An annotation element would be free of processing expectations and
could therefore be used in new ways. There is an annotation element in
electronic versions of PDF, but rendering it in HTML would be harder
because there's only the title attribute or JavaScript.

The W3C Amaya browser has annotation support.

No consensuses forming.

Action: Mike to provide a list of use cases to motivate discussion at
the next meeting.

| 8. Review of Requests for Enhancement {40 min}
| 
|    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
| 
|    where XXXX is the RFE number.
| 
|    473365 Allow optional in funcprototype

How about optionalparamdefs instead? Do we need the same thing for
methodsynopsis (optionalmethodparams)?

Action: Norm to float this suggestion on the list and see if other
people are having similar problems.

|    488368 Simplify single index entries

I think entities really are the right choice here, but I'm not sure
what you'd do in an entity-free world. One concern I have about the
pointing mechanism is that the pointed-to entries have no knowledge
that they're pointed to, so apparently harmless changes could be
dramatic.

Proposed: Reject. Use entities for now. Using links is too much
complexity for this problem. Accepted.

|    495853 add 'caption' to listitem content-model

This is a can of worms: what's the difference between a caption and a title?

Action: Norm to ask the submitter: do you really want introductory
text? If not, how do you imagine this would be rendered?

|    507975 revision should allow author

Proposed: accept this change. Accepted.

|    514244 Allowing xref inside link

This is really 'gentext': xref without link semantics. Otherwise there
are nested linking issues.

We could say that xref inside a link has no linking semantics, it just
generates text.

We could add an attribute to control this behavior.

No consensuses forming.

Action: Paul to report what the XHTML and XSL FO specs actually say
about nested links.

Insufficient time for remaining issues. (But we did make progress! :-)

Meeting adjourned at 14:31 EDT.

|    514425 Simplify info elements
|    514435 Allow reference within refentry
|    517604 Optional Title for GlossList
|    518074 More database classes
|    524225 iso-latin-5 ent
|    533734 Allow methodsynopsis not to have paramet
|    538187 Descriptions for XML character entities
|    413389 Enhance METHODNAME and VARNAME
|    425730 Create an SVG module
|    431411 RFE 70: add generic linking capability
|    436067 splitting tech.char.class
|    468700 clarify version id in release filenames

Done as of DocBook 4.2CR1

|    482818 Simplify ToC content model
|    522552 Add title attribute to <ulink> element
|
| [1] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-tc/200203/msg00013.html
| [2] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook/200203/msg00132.html
| [3] http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=9352&group_id=21935
| [4] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-tc/200204/msg00002.html
| [5] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-tc/200204/msg00006.html

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | A hen is only an egg's way of
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | making another egg.--Samuel Butler
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee | (II)