Guidelines and Procedures note and version numbers

From: Marco C. Leoni <mleoni-at-eso.org>
Date: Thu, 01 Apr 2004 15:04:53 +0200


Hi Everybody,

    The most labour intensive part for the DC is reformatting documents to/from HTML, especially if the input HTML is automatically generated by some word processor. I'd like to propose the following section to clarify how to go about this.

2. Document Format

    The official format for IVOA documents is HTML. Templates in this format can be found at http://www.ivoa.net/Documents/templates.

    An automatic procedure is used to convert HTML documents into other common formats (PDF, MS-WORD). If the resulting output of this procedure is not satisfactory, the Document Coordinator will assist the Author(s) in producing the initial Working Draft version 1.0 from which such a loss less conversion is possible. In any case the Author(s) will be informed about the technical problem and advised to use the massaged html document as the baseline for future updates.

    If the authors prefer to work from a different baseline thereafter the conversion to other formats will be performed only if the output is complete and therefore consistent with the original and if this can be achieved without manual editing of the original.

First of all, the standard process is about document specification, whereas software implementation is something different.

Having said that, let me recall a discussion Tony, Ray and myself had some time ago:

"[...] I would prefer: http://www.ivoa.net/xml/VOResource/v0.9

Since the status as working draft is irrelevant for the namespace - it *IS*

the namespace we are using for that schema, it is not a working draft, it is actual.

[...]
We cannot guarantee a 1:1 relationship between schema and document so it is pointless to tie the schema namespace to any document naming scheme." [Tony]

This should explain why we do not want to have the same numbering for documents and xml files.

By the way, having ten possibilities to go from one level to another should be sufficient, simply requires some attention in producing a new *document*.

Cheers,

    Marco Received on 2004-04-01Z13:05:16