Advisory Committee:
Apologies:
The call agenda was distributed to the Advisory Committee list on June 3 with one attachment, being the announcement for NISO. Additions to the call agenda involve questions about the Requirements process: questions are what to do with the requirements that have been posted, when to reply to the submitters, do people understand that the Issues Tracking is about submitting bugs in the Standard.
The next call is June 18. George welcomed Reuben and John to their first call. Ole confirmed that Thomas left DBB one week ago. Diana joined late and will have introduce another developer from her office on next call, who will cover her during her leave.
George announced that we do have confirmation from Google for a FTF Conference at their campus on October 8-10. There are requirements that Google employees attend the conference. T.V.Raman will join us. He had presented the keynote in Beijing at the W4A Conference and included positive comments about DAISY. James pointed out that Yom Kippur is on the 9th. Markus cannot attend if a meeting is held in October. In order to bring Markus into the meeting the FTF meeting date will be changed to mid-September.
Lynn outlined that this is the last major revision for the SG before the Standard itself changes and asked if committee members would find time to review. There are 2 new sections: Poetry and Mathematics, plus many illustrations and sample markup. If anyone finds problems with the SG, they should be entered in the Issues Tracking database.
George asked if the SG are part of what this committee in involved in and needs to approve. The SG are referenced in the Standard so this committee is the technical authority that anyone would turn to if any questions, but should not require a specific approval process. Marisa asked if we want to see the SG become more standards-like. Some guidelines have the weight of law such as the W4A and Section 508 Guidelines. James pointed out that NIMAS requires that everything be marked up according to the SG. Publishers had asked for reference documents and illustrations. Markus pointed out that the comments can be built into schema documents and extracted via XSLT to provide documentation that is clearly linked to the specification.
Lynn pointed out that one of the goals of the SG is to be used by people who are not super techy. Integrating the SG with the next version of the Standard is desirable to completely cover the semantics. Boris suggested a full approach of adding tutorials for any gray areas may need even further coverage.
George asked for comments on the document for NISO: Work Item Title: Proposed Revision to Z39.86 Specifications for the Digital Talking Book which outlines the proposed development schedule. Markus asked about what components were to be included on the first target date of January 15. He confirmed that the first deliverable would be DTBook Next, which would mean 3 months, October, November, December, to come up with this. The Braille working group may want to have a meeting in August, for reasons of the DAISY Online group as well. George summarized that this work schedule is extremely aggressive. From the begin date we have at most 2 years; so need to have a shorter duration. George expressed that it is hard to understand how NISO wants us to start work as of a certain date when NISO would not yet have announced who is the head of the working group, etc.
George clarified that when a bug gets reported regarding the current standard, the committee may decide that it's not really a bug, but a feature request and is to be entered in the Requirements database, not that we have accepted it but that we are accepting it as a requirement at this point in time. Jennifer has witnessed that the general public does not know where to enter bug reports.
Kathy posted a list of outstanding issues via email. All issues relating to the Structure Guidelines have been closed. Other outstanding issues were reviewed; note that several action items may be included in each resolution.:
Rewrite the DTBook DTD CSS to be compatible with IE, related to #155. Apparently this is relating to the problem of browsers not displaying images and tables correctly which is a monstrous browser problem, not specific to the DAISY Standard, nor is the CSS part of the Standard. There is already a future requirement to the spec to resolve distribution and rendering problems. It does not seem like we should spend time fixing the old standard. Markus called this a feature not a bug.
Resolution: Resolve as a future requirement. Jennifer will check if any requirements already cover this specifically, and either way, add references to Issues #196 and #155 to the Requirements database. Markus noted that this is related to the requirement for handling Ruby. Boris noted that since we want to release supporting software at the same time as the spec, it could be mentioned that this should include appropriate CSS. The submitter of the issue should be notified that this is now resolved as part of the requirements.
DTB Title Validation, re title meta elements, ZedVal should be extended to require at least one of these 2 elements.
Resolution: Assign to Markus for resolution via ZedVal.
"Should pageTarget element's value attribute be required?" in the NCX DTD where the title is currently an optional item. This is coming out of the MathML group. Markus summarized that this is a very messy part of the spec in terms of trying to build ZedVal and interpret exactly what is intended. Markus suggests to leave it, and clarify in the next version of the standard since it would probably require extensive redesign of all the cross refs. Lloyd confirmed that this has been a problem at NLS for NLSVal.
Resolution: Transition this to the Requirements database. Jennifer will notify Dennis Leas regarding the resolution.
There needs to be an element with an id before and after a math element. This is needed for any kind of block that needs to be identified, such as a footnote. James pointed out that this is an authoring problem, and is a good use for span. There needn't be a special element for this.
Resolution: Dismiss as a known requirement in production tools.
Ole submitted this which came from converting DTBook 1.1 to 2005 content which did allow empty levels. George noted that this issue also came up with the blank paragraphs inserted to get validation by Microsoft Save as DAISY. This sounds like a problem of content with empty levels, which if it doesn't validate, they throw in an empty paragraph. This has been discussed by the developers of the Pipeline 1.1 to 2005 converter.
Resolution: Dismiss as probably due to errors in the content and recommend that a blank paragraph be inserted. Ole believes that this might be generated as part of creating an index. There may be a future requirement coming out of this for indices. Ole to provide guidance on this for followup at the next meeting.
This was not discussed due to time constraints.
Time: 10:00 – 11:00 EDT (1400 UTC)
Venue: telcon
Conference Recording Filename: 20080604 (call the DAISY Conference number and enter *3 for playback)
Scribe: Kathy Kahl
Last Edited: 2008 June 15
Status: Version 1, for review