Minutes – Z39.86 Advisory Committee Conference Call

Attendees

Advisory Committee:

• George Kerscher, Advisory Committee Chair – DAISY Consortium and Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic
• James Pritchett – Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic
• Lloyd Rasmussen – National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped
• Dave Pawson – Royal National Institute of the Blind
• Neil Bernstein – National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped
• Linus Ericson, Swedish Library of Talking Books and Braille
• Marisa DeMeglio – DAISY for All Project
• Markus Gylling – DAISY Consortium and Swedish Library of Talking Books and Braille
• Ole Holst Andersen – The Danish National Library for the Blind
• Laurie Sherve, Scribe – DAISY Consortium

Participating Experts:

• Chris Wilder-Smith – CAST
• Neil Soiffer – Design Science

Apologies:

• Thomas Kjellberg Christensen – Danish Library for the Blind

Agenda

• The agenda was distributed to the Advisory Committee's list on 2006 April 04. There were no amendments in advance of the call.

Confirmation of Date and Time for Next Call

GK proposed that the next call be held on 2006 May 03.

Technical Directions Summit Summary

The white paper should highlight DAISY's technical direction. Some questions to consider, why should DAISY books contain SMIL if the books contain only text? Also, why do DAISY books use SMIL if a book is a pure audio book? Why can't an audio-only DAISY book be played in an Ipod environment?

Markus noted this is similar to the idea of customizing and subsetting a base specification to create a profile that fit a specific application. The current specification contains a bit of something for everyone, but not everything for someone. SMIL is becoming more powerful to support multimedia context but at the cost of greater complexity.

With white paper in hand, the DAISY Consortium will seek input from multimedia organizations, such as Microsoft, Apple, Sun, OASIS, Adobe. With input from these organizations, an agenda for a technical summit will be created.

The technical summit would be small with 20 to 30 attending. The committee would probably meet after the technical directions summit. The goal of the summit would be to creat a technical directions road map for DAISY. The committee could also map out the standards development needed based on this road map.

Documentation Extension and Element Semantics

On March 17, Dave sent a zip file containing the element semantics documents. He took the xml comments from the DTD with a Relax NG schema (scd.html). The element semantics document (sd.html) links to the schema and the structured guidelines.

The scd.html file is linked to the structure guidelines and should be placed in a directory above them.

George suggested that these documents become part of the Structured Guidelines. Once we update from a DTD to a schema, (such as Relax NG) we can wrap element definitions in <div>'s and eventually automatically generate the semantics document.

Dave asked if these documents should be placed in a version control system such as Sourceforge. Markus agreed that they should be in a version control system of some sort.

Remaining Submitted Issues

Issues to Address with DTD revision

The following issues will be addressed at the same time as the DTD revision:

• Smil attributes needed for Math and other extensions. James to add issue to the database.
• Title attribute does not allow an id (#52)

Markus will send an email to clarify the proposed solutions in the DTD revision document.

Namespace change

Markus: We need a policy on namespace changes. If or when a namespace changes, the name of every element will change. When and under what circumstances should a developer expect a namespace change?

George, Markus, and James will author a maintenance update description/policy including namespace updates. The draft document will be posted to the zed committee for revisions.

Lloyd, while working in the 2002 and 2005 specs, and Markus coding ZedVal agreed that the page list value attribute, has confusing wording in the specification. James and Markus agreed to bring this up as a suggestion for clarification. <ljs>Is this to be submitted as an issue?

George will ask Lloyd to submit as an issue. (Added after the call.)

Extend DTD for inline and block elements

In the DTD, there are several elements that function as both block and inline elements, i.e. prodnote, pageno, imagegroup, and code.

Dave suggested that a solution is to have a different element name for block and inline elements, and different element roots. For example <pre> would function only as a block element, and <code> would function only as an inline element.

Markus agreed that this suggestion is architecturally sound, but it is a long term solution since it is not enforceable with a DTD.

Items identified for next meeting

	  Identify the process for updating the specification.