The following is a report from the first meeting of the SC4WG6 working group on "Electronic Publishing". The meetings of this working group will henceforth take place semi-annually during the large SGML meetings, once in Europe in May, once in the USA in November/December. This will allow delegates to find easier justification for the travel involved.
As can be seen from the report of the meeting, there was a very good turn-out. There are several serious users of ISO 12083. I encourage you to participate in this standards activity so that we can improve ISO 12083 and create new work items for your benefit.
Eric van Herwijnen
1. Amendment or corrigendum to ISO12083. A small number of bugs and some 'cosmetic changes' (e.g., attributes should be placed immediately following the element) need to be fixed. A discussion took place on whether to introduce an "anchor" tag (as in HTML), or whether to wait for the HyTime Corrigendum which will allow HyTime documents to address objects via URLs. It was decided to wait for the HyTime Corrigendum (Michel Biezunski to report to this group). A resolution was passed to permit only backward compatible changes to ISO 12083 in any amendment/corrigendum (except in the case of clear errors, of course). A number of user comments have been posted on comp.text.sgml and other discussion groups. Some users, e.g. the Electricite de France have made extensive suggestions for improvements. It was decided that a collection of implementors' comments should be made (Chris Ziener and Pat Harris to coordinate). From this collection a proposal for an amendment/corrigendum will be prepared for the next meeting.
2. Michel Biezunski made a short report about CApH (Conventions for the Application of HyTime). This could become a work item for SC4WG6 if the WG8 is not interested. Michel will keep SC4WG6 informed about this.
3. Beth Micksch will inform SC4WG6 about the SGML Open catalog option.
4. Ed Buchinski will contact Russel Thomas to send Eric van Herwijnen an e-mail concerning mapping locations to persistent identifiers.
5. There is interest in standardizing a DTD for chemical formulas. Some work has been done, but no one has exact details. Pat Harris will look for a contact person in the ACS, ACM, or Chemical Abstracts. Evan Owens will send Eric van Herwijnen information on chemical entities. By the next meeting we should have established contacts with the active people in this area and come with a proposal.
6. DSSSL core implementation for ISO 12083. There was no expertise on this topic among the participants. Members are encouraged to follow this point up.
7. Mathematics. Roy Pike has a proposal for a semantical math DTD. A new work item was started with the objective to standardize this DTD so that it can be used concurrently with the existing ISO 12083 math DTD. The proposal will be put up on the Web server. Roy Pike will run a subcommittee which will meet around March 1996 to discuss his proposal. People interested to join the subcommitte should contact Roy Pike.
8. Bibliographic citation. There is a proposal from Tom Gordon that can be used as a starting point for creating a bibliographic citation sub DTD. It will be posted up on the Web server for comments. No person was identified for coordinating this work item, but Pat Harris will identify someone suitable.
9. The next meeting of SC4WG6 will be held during SGML Europe 1996, May 12-17 in Munich, Germany.