06.28.07

SLAs

Posted in TC Process at 1:52 pm by Mary McRae

Are you aware that there are published SLAs (a/k/a turnaround times) for TC Administration tasks? While the TC Process defines several explicit SLAs, we have tried to fill in the gaps. If you’re planning your schedule to target a particular date, you’ll want to take these into consideration. Of course my goal is to turnaround requests as quickly as possible, but oftentimes there’s already a queue.

Here they are:

  • Announcement of Public Review: 5 business days
  • Launch Committee Specification Ballot: 5 business days
  • Launch other Special Majority Ballots: 3 business days
  • Create Subcommittee: 3 business days
  • Announce ballot results: 3 business days
  • Requests to use external facility resources (such as systems support): 5 business days
  • Publish standing rules: 5 business days

The Checklist

Posted in general, spec writing, template usage at 9:15 am by Mary McRae

Did you know that there’s a checklist? I created it earlier this year mostly as an aid for myself but also as something that could be used by TCs to check their submissions before sending to me. The checklist identifies all of those areas that are required in the TC Process, templates, and Naming / Metadata Guidelines and even includes hypertext links to the actual sections in case you need more details on the requirement.

I hope you find it useful. If you have further suggestions or additions, please let me know.

Why Valid isn’t Good Enough

Posted in XHTML, general at 8:49 am by Mary McRae

It should be a “good thing” that OpenOffice has an XHTML export filter. It should be an even better thing that the resulting XHTML is actually DTD-valid. But, unfortunately, valid doesn’t always mean “correct.” In the case of OpenOffice the resulting document is of little use. Font sizes will change sporadically, and all numbering (paragraphs, lists) is out the window. What’s even worse is that I seem incapable of getting valid/usable XHTML out of OpenOffice no matter how many sidesteps I take. I’ve tried the Tidy trick. I’ve tried saving as a Word file. I’ve tried opening the OO file in Word using the new OO import/output filter. All to no avail.

So, if you’re one of those Technical Committees who are authoring your documents in OpenOffice, please just save as HTML.:-(

06.27.07

Creating Valid XHTML v1.0 Transitional from MS Word

Posted in XHTML at 1:59 pm by Mary McRae

The bad news is that even Office 2007 doesn’t have an “export as XHTML” option. The good news is that with a few simple steps you can get XHTML that not only validates but also looks good ;-)

The first step is to save as HTML using the filtered option. This removes a lot of extraneous markup that is only necessary if you plan on “round-tripping” back into Microsoft Word. Since you still have the original Word file, there’s no need to carry around the excess baggage.

The next step is to run the html file through Tidy. I use Tidy Online – just browse to the html file on your local system,  select “xhtml” and you’re off and running. Save the resulting file to your local system.

There’s one more step before you’re done. Tidy still has a few problems, and one of the things it doesn’t get quite right are the “lang” attributes. They should be “xml:lang”. I solve this problem by running a global search-and-replace on “lang=” (include the “=” to make sure you don’t inadvertently replace the string elsewhere in your document) and replace it with “xml:lang=”. You should now be able to validate the instance without error.  The bad new is that there will still be numerous warnings, but we’ll save those for another day.

06.24.07

Welcome!

Posted in general at 5:06 pm by Mary McRae

I’ll be writing about the creation and maintenance of OASIS Technical Committee work products – everything from using templates to creating conformance clauses. I’ll throw in some XML, XHTML and RDDL along the way, and tips on making sure your specification passes muster.