Minutes – Z39.86 Advisory Committee Conference Call

Attendees

Advisory Committee:

• George Kerscher, Advisory Committee Chair – DAISY Consortium and Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic
• Ole Holst Andersen – The Danish National Library for the Blind
• Neil Bernstein – National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped
• Thomas Kjellberg Christensen – The Danish National Library for the Blind
• Marisa DeMeglio – DAISY for All Project
• Linus Ericson – Swedish Library of Talking Books and Braille
• Markus Gylling – DAISY Consortium and Swedish Library of Talking Books and Braille
• Kenny Johar – Vision Australia
• Rob Longstaff – Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB)
• James Pritchett – Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic
• Lloyd Rasmussen – National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped

Participating Experts:

• Boris Goldowsky – CAST
• Kathy Kahl, Scribe – DAISY Consortium
• Lynn Leith – DAISY Consortium
• Diana Hiorth Persson – Dolphin

Apologies:

• Dominic Labbé – HumanWare
• Jennifer Sutton – DAISY Consortium, Consultant

Agenda

The agenda for the call was distributed to the Advisory Committee list on December 4. There were no additions to the agenda.

Confirmation of Date and Time for Next Call

The next conference call is 2007 December 19, 0900 Eastern USA.

Announcements

Maintenance

The draft version of the errata document was reviewed. The markup for each errata entry will be in the resolution field of the Issues database. The errata document will be auto-generated from the database and marked with the most recent date updated. The issue description need not be included in the errata document.

DTD issues and assignments

Three main substantive issues were discussed:

• Issue 199
  There is agreement to allow pagenum within tables. In general, it is desirable to allow page numbers within any block element. This was not an oversight but the problem is whether to allow pagenum as a sibling element to <tr> which is normally where a page break would occur, i.e. as a child of <table> or <tbody>. The issue is whether to represent the page or represent the data.There is currently a comment in the DTD to have all of the pagenum's before the table, but this is a non-optimal inflexible solution. Problems with braille tables and pages, page number spans, were discussed.This is assigned to Linus to work up a solution.
  Issue 200: The same approach is to be taken with <pagenum> elements within <imggroup>; also assigned to Linus.
  
• Issue 212 (group of noterefs)
  The problem is that there are occasional references to a range of notes such as "see notes 1 - 5". The workaround is to have the five noterefs all together. Linus had suggested defining a list of noterefs. It forces the reading system to deal with multiple noterefs rather than one but complicates the interface. The decision is to dismiss this one.
• Issue 211 (MathML spec requires two metadata elements)
  There is no way to enforce having two meta elements with a DTD. The meta element is not required inside of head. This should be a validation issue not a DTD issue since this cannot be enforced by DTD. The validation should be done in ZedVal when it is updated to include the MathML Specification requirements.
  

James has volunteered to edit the DTD. Linus and Ole are going to provide proposed solutions to the substantive issues. Other members of the maintenance group who have been assigned the non-substantive issues should submit solutions. We should have agreement on these solutions within the next week and James will have a new DTD for us by the next meeting on December 19th. We can let Microsoft know that an updated DTD is coming. Boris and Kathy should have the testing done by January 15. The announcement will be just before the NIMAS Conference.

Structure Guidelines

Per LEL, all submitted issues are resolved in the Structure Guidelines 2007 that is currently posted for review, except for Issue #90: "Beginning and closing announcements in DTBs need to be standardized to facilitate DAISY DTB sharing between organizations with minimal impact on the DTB user". The opening information about the book should be in a sequence that is familiar for the user. This was requested by the Board so is written but is not currently in the SG2007. This could be put in as an appendix or a separate document, since we don't want to hold up the review of SG2007 for this. It may not even end up in the SG, since the resolution might end up as markup with SMIL elements. The agreement is to leave Issue #90 as unresolved since more discussion is needed.

The Structure Guidelines 2007 needs detailed review by members of this committee.

Requirements Gathering