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Subject: Re: Review of AIR = ASIS, possibly mandatory policy?
At 2006-02-22 17:01 -0800, jon.bosak@sun.com wrote:
>UBL TC,
>
>Forwarded as requested.
>
>Jon
>------- Start of forwarded message -------
>Date: Fri, 17 Feb 2006 16:11:17 -0800
>From: James Bryce Clark <jamie.clark@oasis-open.org>
>Subject: [chairs] Draft ASIS under review: mandatory policy? Please review
> and comment by 1 March
>To: chairs@lists.oasis-open.org
Regarding:
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/16546/ArtifactStandardIdentificationSchemeForMetadata-1.0.1.pdf
Line 352 - this is an action item for OASIS staff, not an aspect of
this standard ... the "SHALL" in this jumps out at me as totally
unnecessary. By the time most people have read this document, this
action item should have long been acted on. Unless, of course, I'm
misunderstanding the sentence in which case it should be
rewritten. But, if this updating is a one-time action, is it on the
part of those who maintain the The OASIS Document Templates? When
will the decisions be incorporated into the templates (note in my
postscript below that I've been working on the DocBook XML
templates)? A lot of UBL 2.0 is already in development ... will a
change in the templates while writing a new specification mean that
work in progress would become non-conforming?
Lines 354-386 - I'm not sure what is meant by "consistent tabular
form", especially since it looks like the RFC822-styled prompts and
values (which is distinctly not "tabular" (I interpret this as
systematic aligned rows and columns; the columns are not aligned in
RFC822-styled mail headers). I don't see guidelines as to how this
"consistent tabular form" is to be rendered in various
renditions? Should it be an HTML table? If in a PDF table, with
visible cell borders (perhaps, somewhere in the front
matter)? Should it be also in HTML <meta> elements (I think so;
though I don't know how I'll do this in DocBook)?
Line 408 - I think ECMA-6 is a poor choice for a 128-byte character
set because of the two ambiguous "alternative graphic character
allocations" (6.4.2) ... I suppose this is covered because the
exclusive list is indicated, so I guess this isn't a problem. Why
use ECMA and not, say, ISO-646? Actually, I guess it has the same
issue. Therefore, why bother citing anything and not just list the
characters ... would this in fact cause problems with a mainframe
tool that happens to be using EBCDIC? The fact that it is the
correct ECMA/ISO characters when it is being mounted in the
repository is fine regardless of how it was written, but given that
this is a *naming* standard and not an *encoding* standard, then just
listing the characters should be sufficient and any mention of
character set is probably unnecessary embellishment.
Oh, I just found the reference to <meta> in HTML in section 6.4.1 ...
though it isn't an exhaustive list of the metadata. If ASIS is going
to the trouble of listing all of the metadata components, then
perhaps these should be mandatory XHTML metadata entries as
well. Actually, not *just* XHTML, but for every rendition an example
is needed of what it is to look like ... otherwise, how would I be
able to modify the DocBook XML templates in a conformant fashion?
Line 532 - Absent here are ZIP and TAR/GZ files (though I don't know
what to do about them) ... I think they should be recognized ...
perhaps have a companion ".txt" file (though I hate the idea of
having information in more than one file)? Though perhaps having a
companion ".txt" file for all binary file types will be both
sufficient and consistent, but line 350 provides a list of required
metadata elements "The following metadata MUST be associated with
each Artifact...", so it would have to be documented that for every
binary file (or file without a human-readable rendition) that one can
expect to find a .txt file with the meta data. That could add a lot of files!
Line 596 - Shouldn't this be a reference to Section 7.1?
I think it is going to be difficult to get Joe and Jane
StandardsWriter to accurately divine what values for properties in
these guidelines apply to documents they create for their committee
... could the guidelines require each TC to publish somewhere visibly
in their work pages what the choices are for metadata properties
related to all documents for that particular committee? That way two
people in one TC don't end up making different decisions based on
their respective interpretations of these guidelines. I'm learning
that one really has to spoon feed stuff like this to people who are
made responsible for creating things ... they won't take the energy
to have to interpret administrivia and distract them from their
technical writing.
So, I then took a look overall at ASIS and I realized that I really
couldn't effectively distill what the important guidelines would be
for, say, the UBL TC or my HISC subcommittee of UBL.
Consider for example the tree of file with the following directory at the apex:
http://docs.oasis-open.org/ubl/cd-UBL-1.0/
... the artifact in that directory has to be named "index.html" in
order to be properly displayed by the server when the directory is
referenced. Does this mean that the directory has the artifact
name? Probably, but there are 244 files in that tree. Are *all* of
them (except the necessary exceptions for the directory "index.html"
files) to be named with these ASIS guidelines? If none of them are
used outside of the context of UBL 1.0, why would the artifact naming
guidelines apply? I can see them applying to the apex directory and
to any ZIP file that would be used out of context of the
directory. That's it! The difference is, when is a committee
artifact found *only* in a given context and when is a committee
artifact allowed to live outside of that context? The apex directory
can be found in any context, so its name follows the artifact naming
guidelines. The ZIP or TAR/GZ packages of the directory can be found
in any context, so its name would also follow the guidelines. And,
as above, I suppose also an associated text file with the metadata
for those compressed packages.
This would greatly simplify a committee's work. I had the
responsibility for creating the directory at the apex:
http://docs.oasis-open.org/ubl/cd-UBL-1.0/fs/
There are 99 files just in my subtree. BUT my subtree isn't ever
found outside of the context of the UBL 1.0 deliverable, so none of
the artifacts in that subtree would be out of context (or should be
out of context, of course they might be if someone made copies them
without copying the other files, but when they are in context on the
UBL web site inside of the UBL 1.0 deliverable, they are
correct). The burden of going through all 99 files of my subtree and
renaming each and every file to follow the artifact naming guidelines
(examples, graphics, linked specifications, etc.) would deter me from
going through the effort to produce everything that is needed by the
readers. I ended up with 99 files because that tree of hyperlinked
documents and examples is what I felt the reader needed. If I had to
go to so much effort for all 99 files, I would have produced fewer
files without as much information and the reader wouldn't have been
as well served.
I believe OASIS has to make the process of writing specifications
*easier* in order to help people with limited time involved in the
already lengthy process of writing to produce something that can be
used. Therefore, the burden should be focused to accomplish the goal
and not so broad as to deter contributions. As I said above, I think
it is sufficient that the burden of identifying artifacts at the apex
directory and any files that might be found outside of the context of
the apex directory.
Perhaps it is easier than I thought and I was just confused by the
lack of examples. In particular, since I chair two subcommittees and
one task group below the UBL umbrella, are these distinctions
irrelevant? Are my work products just considered UBL work products?
. . . . . . . . . . Ken
p.s. regarding the templates, I put 33 hours into modifying Norm's
former DocBook guidelines for OASIS standards into a new set of
guidelines to try and help writers using XML, by including all the
sections matching the Word and OOo templates found in:
http://docs.oasis-open.org/templates
You can find these new stylesheets and complete publishing package details in:
http://docs.oasis-open.org/templates/DocBook/spec-0.4/oasis-specification-0.4.html
In order to try and get my UBL colleagues to use XML to create the
standards documents, I tried to make this environment as turnkey as
possible with detailed examples of what to do. Hopefully by doing
so, members would be more encouraged about writing specification
documents since the environment would produce the desired
presentation without the writer having to think about it. To prove
to myself the environment is functional, I've since used the
environment to create the two work products announced in:
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/ubl/200602/msg00062.html
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/ubl/200602/msg00069.html
So, your decisions impact on me by bringing my latest work to the new
ASIS standard, and I don't see enough information in there to do a
complete job.
--
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