From owner-incits-v1@incits-v1.org Wed May 30 06:27:14 2007 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Date: Wed, 30 May 2007 09:26:11 -0400 From: "Mason, James David (MXM)" Subject: RE: INCITS-V1: Clean, normative, non-duplicative version? In-reply-to: <465D5320.4060304@durusau.net> Sender: owner-incits-v1@incits-v1.org To: incits-v1@incits-v1.org Reply-to: incits-v1@incits-v1.org X-MIMEOLE: Produced By Microsoft Exchange V6.5 X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by midtown.nycx.com id l4UDQLTf012343 Content-class: urn:content-classes:message Thread-topic: INCITS-V1: Clean, normative, non-duplicative version? Thread-index: AceipkQAmR0CzFFgRuWB4elFI48/egAFKsng X-PMX-Version: 5.2.0.264296 X-MS-Has-Attach: X-MS-TNEF-Correlator: X-OriginalArrivalTime: 30 May 2007 13:26:13.0263 (UTC) FILETIME=[17F2E9F0:01C7A2BE] I second Patrick's request for a document that restricts itself as much as possible to normative text: It's essential that we know precisely what we're standardizing. In a recent message I observed that I'm making a large squawk in the OASIS ODF committee about the contents of a document that they have not yet sent to SC34. It's largely over this sort of issue. It's one thing to write practical documentation for end users of a product and another to define a specification. The current documents that have been sent out by ECMA confuse the two functions. I'm all in favor of seeing lots of examples of how the markup that is proposed for standardization should be used, but not in the standard. The standard should provide the schema and then document each element with its precise semantics. The examples, which are indeed extremely valuable, should be put in a technical report. (SC34 has a long history of such TRs, beginning with a series "Techniques for Using SGML.") I admit to mixed feelings about the tables of parents, descendents, and cross references. I do not believe they should be normative text, but I find them useful because the contents of the standard are otherwise not in a useful order. (I was looking into the math markup a few days ago, and without the cross reference tables, I would have had considerable difficulty finding the values on an attribute because the attribute was defined nowhere near the element that uses it, even though that is the only element that uses it.) As a practical matter, I don't like to have large, complex standards in paper (or paper-analogue, like PDF). I greatly prefer hypertext for study. But ISO expects paper. Nonetheless, while we're working on this thing as a candidate for standardization, we need it in some form that facilitates study. Patrick asks for a purged text with a concordance. I would prefer a hypertext. I cited the hypertext of HyTime (http://www1.y12.doe.gov/capabilities/sgml/wg8/document/n1920/index.htm) as a model, but what I'd prefer is a Topic Map. Jim Mason -----Original Message----- From: owner-incits-v1@incits-v1.org [mailto:owner-incits-v1@incits-v1.org] On Behalf Of Patrick Durusau Sent: Wednesday, May 30, 2007 6:34 AM To: incits-v1@incits-v1.org Subject: INCITS-V1: Clean, normative, non-duplicative version? Greetings! Just in case my last message on this topic got lost in the holiday backlog. I am requesting the production of a plain text of DIS 29500 that: 1. Includes only normative text (excludes examples, rationales, etc.) 2. Includes section numbers (but no TOCs) 3. Excludes all reference tables such as parent, child, referenced by 4. Eliminates duplicate definitions of attributes by substituting a reference to the section where an attribute is defined 5. Excludes all image I understand the text is generated from a database or similar application so it should simply be a matter of setting up another view of the documents. This would be very useful as I could use the resulting text to build concordances of only the normative portions of DIS 29500. Which would help: 1. Insure consistent use of control vocabulary terms like shall, should, must, etc. 2. Insure uniform use of elements and attributes 3. Improve the readability of the proposal from those of us already familiar with markup 4. Uncover places where elements or attributes are treated inconsistently I routinely use concordances with 700+ page standard drafts and have found them to be very useful. Can we get an estimate on when we can see such a version of DIS 29500? Thanks! Hope everyone is having a great day! Patrick PS: I would suggest 80 column line breaks. Would make the ASCII view of the text more readable. -- Patrick Durusau Patrick@Durusau.net Chair, V1 - Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface Co-Editor, ISO 13250, Topic Maps -- Reference Model Member, Text Encoding Initiative Board of Directors, 2003-2005 Topic Maps: Human, not artificial, intelligence at work!