Re: [Scrollkeeper-devel] strange DTD changes

[Dan M. <mu...@al...>]

Thanks for the discussion. It is nice to read it and preserve it here.  
Thanks also for volunteering to work on the DTD.  I'm sure you and Eric
can come up with a great new version.  I think in general the OMF has been
languishing a bit, and the discrepencies between the spec and DTD are
annoying.  It would be good to close up the gaps.

Could anybody comment on the viability of writing a stylesheet to convert 
OMF files from one DTD version to another?  It seems completely doable, 
and I think John has already done this for migrating OMF files from SK-0.2 
to SK-0.3.x/0.4, although I'm not sure what the final verdict is on how 
well it works.  Comments John?

I think we generally want to get any nasty bugs remaining in 0.3.x fixed 
and put out 0.4.0 soon.  Then we can start working on some of these 
problems in the 0.5.x developer series.  So far I think the big changes 
for 0.5.x/0.6.0 are:

1) DTD cleanup (and stylesheet/code for backward compatibility of OMFs)
2) URI resolution (eg. for cross-referencing documents)

Anything else?

Technically these should be straightforward, but they both require a fair
amount of thought so we come up with a sane standard.

Dan


On Sat, 25 May 2002, Martijn van Beers wrote:

> On Mon, May 20, 2002 at 12:01:20AM -0500, Dan Mueth wrote:
> > I'm open to arguments for why we should or should not use the <person> 
> > tag in place of RFC822.
> 
> 
> So, I happened on Eric Baudais on irc the other day, and we had the
> following enlightening discussion:
> 
> [...]
>  * LotR thwaps drake for writing such a lousy one
> <drake> I was just doing as I was told to anyways.  I think SK should
>         use V2 of OMF anyways.
> <drake> I wrote the DTD for that one with an emphasis on
>         compliance with V1.0 of the OMF.
> <LotR> there's a newer version of the OMF spec then?
> <drake> Yes, it does things The Right Way (tm).  It's either 1.2
>         of 2.0...cannot remember which now.  SK uses the older OMF spec.
> <LotR> url?
> <LotR> (the website only seems to have 1.0)
> <drake> Look at the DTD at
>         http://ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/metadata/OMF.dtd
> <LotR> oh, that's newer?
> <drake> Also take a look at
>         http://dulug.duke.edu/~mark/docs/dtds/xml/omf-1.1/index.html
> <LotR> now I'm really confused
> <LotR> was there also a 1.0 DTD?
> <drake> Yes, that is the one I modified and SK uses.
> <LotR> but earlier OMF files already used the <person> bits from
>        more recent DTDs
> <drake> What SK was using prior was a format halfway between OMF
>         1.0 and OMF 1.1.  I do not think that OMF 1.0 defined <person>.
> <LotR> oh
> <LotR> so why was the decision made to use V1.0?
> <LotR> and if you think we should use a newer version, could you
>        weigh in on the current thread I started?
> <drake> I don't think there was a decision, but SK had always been
>         using V1.0.
> <drake> Okay, I think that Dan told me that V1.0 of OMF never had
>         a DTD, but V1.1 of OMF did.
> <drake> I looked at the V1.1 DTD and saw there were serious
>         changes between the published documentation from OMF and the DTD.
> <drake> Example: There is a toplevel element <versionGroup> which
>         has a child of <version>.  <version> has children <id>, <date>,
>         and <description>.
> <LotR> yeah, the newer ones are much better xml
> <drake> This contradicts what the OMF element description says,
>         which is that there is one element <version> with three
>         attributes, version.identifier, version.date, and
>         version.description.
> <drake> Since Dan had been using and relying on the V1.0
>         documentation, I just reconstructed what the DTD would be like
>         if one was written for V1.0.  Then I modified it for SK's
>         specific uses.
> <LotR> the OMF people are obviously not very good at version
>        management :)
> <drake> Yes, it's rather a mess.
> <drake> That is the basic history and a lot of my thoughts on how
>         I wrote the DTD which is now in SK.
> <drake> Now that we have something defined, I think people can
>         make cases on whether the DTD is good for SK or if it should be
>         modified and updated.
> [...]
> 
> So, it seems the spec was for version 1.0 of the DTD (which doesn't seem
> to have ever existed), and old scrollkeeper versions seem to have used
> some version of the 1.1 version of the DTD. Hopefully we can change back
> to basing the scrollkeeper DTD on the latest OMF DTD, which is much more
> sane ASAP after the gnome 2.0 release. I'll try to create a DTD based on
> it, with the extra information scrollkeeper wants, like the <relation> tag,
> and send it to the list for discussion.
> 
> 
> Martijn
> 
> 
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