**DRAFT** Report of a teleconference meeting of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34/WG 1, 2010-10-20

ATTENDANCE
==========

[WG 1 "Zip" study group members are given below, an asterisk indicates attendance on this call]

* Alex BROWN (WG 1 Convenor) Griffin Brown Digital Publishing Ltd
* Andrew RIST (US) Oracle
Bob JOLLIFFE (OASIS ODF TC) consultant
Chris Francis (GB) IBM
* Dave PAWSON (GB) consultant
* Dennis HAMILTON (OASIS ODF TC) consultant
* Doug MAHUGH (Ecma) Microsoft
MURATA Makoto (JP) International Univeristy of Japan
Francis CAVE (GB) Francis Cave Digital Publishing Ltd
* Frank FARANCE (US) Farance, Inc
Gareth HORTON (GB) Datawatch
Mohamed ZERGAOUI (FR, W3C, XML Guild) Innovimax SARL
* Jim Peterson (US) PKWare
* Jirka KOSEK (CZ)
Mario Wendt (DE) Microsoft
* Patrick DURUSAU (US) Individual
* Rob WEIR (US, OASIS ODF TC) IBM
Svante Schubert (DE) Oracle

[other WG 1 experts joining the call:]

* David Carlisle (GB) NAG


AGENDA AS ADOPTED (see SC 34 N 1515)
=================

1. Opening [14:00 UTC]

2. Roll call

3. Adoption of the agenda

4. Remarks from the convenor

5. Future meeting schedule

6. Review of outstanding action items

7. Parts of DSDL

8. Study Period on the "Zip" format (see SC 34 N 1494)

10. Any other business

11. Closing


FUTURE MEETINGS
===============

The next WG 1 teleconference date is already scheduled for 2010-11-17 (see SC 34 N 1515).

The next face-to-face meeting of WG 1 will be on 2010-12-09 in Beijing, China (see SC 34 N 1511).

Logisitical information about the Beijing meeting is available in SC 34 N 1479.


ACTIONS (see SC 34 N 1513)
=======

Alex Brown thanking Jirka KOSEK for setting up a mailing list for the "Zip" study activity.

Outstanding action items now are:

# MURATA Makoto, Mohamed ZERGAOUI and Jirka KOSEK to work on proposals for a revision of 19757-4

# Francis CAVE to contact the DAISY consortium wrt creation of a RNG schema

# MURATA Makoto to prepare a working draft of an ISO/IEC 19757-2 v2

# Francis CAVE to produce a DCOR for 19757-8 in response to comments received, and forward it to the convenor for processing

# Alex BROWN & Mohamed ZERGAOUI to submit draft documents outlining idea for a new Part 6 to the dsdl mailing lists

# MURATA Makoto to continue work on his schemas for W3C XML Security and correct problems in the draft around the labelling of sections as normative/non-normative

# Rick JELLIFFE to prepare a proposed disposition of comments in response to the CD ballot on a revision of 19757-3:2006 (SC 34 N 1462)

# All experts ro review Murata-san's schemas prepared for W3C (XML Security, XHTML, etc.)

# Andrew RIST to draft a "problem statement" for the Zip study activity

# Alex BROWN, Jim PETERSON and Rob WEIR to draft some identified features of the Zip format

# Alex BROWN to circulate details of the WG 1 wiki and the locations of key documents for the Zip study


PARTS OF DSDL
=============

Alex Brown noted that a draft DIS text of 19757-11 has been submitted to ITTF for processing.


STUDY PERIOD ON THE "ZIP" FORMAT
================================

Alex BROWN said that discussions so far on the mailing list has shown there were some basic questions which needed answering on the scope of the study activity on the Zip format.

Rob WEIR agreed, saying that we needed to be clear about the scope and the stakeholders. ISO/IEC 26300 and ISO/IEC 29500 were clearly in scope, and we had representation from our W3C liaison. Could we reach out to the IDPF for more information on EPUB’s requirements?

Alex BROWN said that as well as the standards aspect, there was an implementation aspect that may be important. What was the Zip format as experienced by developers user mainstream libraries?

Jim PETERSON said that history of Zip’s evolution meant a variety of specification versions were in use at any one time. He was concerned that settling on any particular subset might cause versioning issues and have an adverse impact on users who were finding some recent features necessary. In his experience, users were tending to use more of the PKWare appnote over time, and not settling on a subset as, after all, the additional features have some utility.

Rob WEIR said he could imagine a scenario where features of the PKWare appnote not currently used by ODF implementations, may be useful in the future. He thought there may be value in considering how the contents of a Zip archive were arranged [the Zip “payload”] – maybe developing a TR containing guidelines for building on the Zip specification.

Dave PAWSON wondered whether these discussions were helping us to narrow down a scope for our work - he believed we should not be discussing Zip payloads.

Frank FARANCE observed that SC 36 had some interest in this topic as they were considering how to include metadata in Zip archives.

Dennis HAMILTON observed that we needed to be careful when talking about layers on top of Zip: there were two types of layering – extensions to the archive format in itself, and extensions applying to the archive payload. There may be a need for extensions to the archive format, for example defining a URI scheme for addressing entries within an archive.

Alex BROWN mentioned that we had undertaken to review SC 29/WG 11’s request on this very topic as part of our work [see SC 34 N1505]. He would send a link to the mailing list.

Dennis HAMILTON said he did not think the whole appnote should be standardized: it was something that had grown by accretion rather than design and contained things which most standards would need to re-work if they used the technology defined “as is”. Standardizing an interoperable subset would be preferable.

Rob WEIR said he did not think we should be setting a Zip subset in stone.

Andrew RIST observed that we needed to proceed with care as Zip was so widely used, for example in the JAR and WAR formats, and that compatibility was a key concern if subsetting took place.

Patrick DURUSAU said he wanted to hear more from PKWare on this topic.

Jim PETERSON said there practically speaking were many profiles of the Zip appnote in use at any one time and that PKWare had an in-depth understanding of the technical details of the specification and its various options. PKWare had no detailed information on what particular profilers had done to profile the PKWare appnote.

Rob WEIR suggested one way forward might be to modularize the Zip specification so that particular features were identified and labelled – this would make the task of profiling easier for users of the spec.

Dave PAWSON raised the topic of patents, and said if we were proposing to standardize the PKWare appnote it would be necessary to have clarity on what IPR issues surrounded it.

Alex BROWN said he thought Rob’s suggestion of identifying and labelling features would help us achieve this, since IPR claims would apply to particular technical features and not to “Zip” as a whole.

Rob WEIR observed that there was scope for patent claims at the payload level, and that they needn’t be confined to the archive format itself.

Andrew RIST said we needed a “problem statement” as a prelude to knowing what direction our study should take, since long-term stability of “Zip” was crucial and it may not be necessary to create a Standard if the current specification proved good enough. He volunteered to draft a problem statement. One possible way forward was to consider making a Referencing Explanatory Report (RER) for the existing PKWare appnote.

There followed a general discussion of the types of ways in which normative technologies may be referenced or incorporated in JTC 1 Standards, including a consideration of whether any eventual “Zip” Standard would be exclusively a for-sale publication. Frank FARANCE said he thought any “Zip” standard should be a good candidate for consensus around making it available free-of-charge, since the specification had been publically available previously.

Alex BROWN reminded the group that its stipulated aim was of establishing a firmer rationale for standardization of aspects of the “ZIP” format.

Jim PETERSON agreed that an agreed problem statement would be useful. With regard to maintenance of Zip there was currently an informal group of interested parties with input into the PKWare appnote, not a formal consortium.

Alex BROWN, Jim PETERSON and Rob WEIR volunteered to help identify some technical features of Zip. Alex BROWN said we use the WG 1 wiki available for this purpose.

[The meeting closed at 15:55 UTC.]