Suggestions for preparation of a Working Draft of "MCE Best Practices"

[Francis Cave]

Dear members of WG 4

 

I had hope to have got rather further forward with thinking about MCE Best
Practices. Rather late in the day I have finally looked at the material that
we have, and have tried to formulate some initial ideas.

 

1. Project aim

 

The aim, as I see it, is to draft a document with working title 'MCE Best
Practices' - a longer title, more helpful to those outside the Working
Group, will probably eventually be needed, but that will do for now - that
will provide supplementary material to assist implementation of ISO/IEC
29500:3.

 

We need to decide whether the document should address ALL implementations of
MCE or only implementations that are based upon ISO/IEC 29500. In the former
case there would be a wider community of interest than just WG 4, and it
would undoubtedly take longer to develop a document that we could be
confident would meet a wide range of use cases. One possibility would be to
start off by attempting to write the document for the more limited audience
of ISO/IEC 29500 implementers, and only aim wider once we are confident that
the we are developing something of use to at least one community of
implementers.

 

2. Scope

 

The document should, I suggest, cover the following topics:

 

-          What is meant by markup extensibility?

o   Extensible markup applications and the key role of namespaces in their
design

-          What kinds of applications might benefit from using MCE?

-          What are the key features of MCE?

o   Alternative Content Blocks

o   Ignorable and "must understand" namespaces

o   Application-defined extension elements.

-          For each of the above, guidance as to appropriate (and possibly
some inappropriate) uses of the feature, with examples.

 

3. Relationship between this document and ISO/IEC 29500:3

 

This document could either form an informative annex in a future revised
edition of ISO/IEC 29500:3, or a Part of the new multi-part standard
(ISO/IEC 30114), or it could be a stand-alone document. I can see potential
benefits in the document starting out as a separate Technical Report,
especially if it is generally felt that this document will take time to
develop and stabilise. Once a broad consensus on MCE best practices has been
reached, the content of the Technical Report could at that stage become an
informative annex of Part 3 or become a Part of the multi-part standard.
However, whatever decision is taken, this document will need to reflect
closely the current text of Part 3, and care will be needed to ensure that
they don't conflict or have too much unnecessary overlap.

 

4. References

 

The following documents are available for reference in preparing an initial
Working Draft:

 

-          Current edition of ISO/IEC 29500:3

-          Semantics of MCE Wiki, including examples

-          SC 34/WG 4 N 223 MCE Best Practices (Microsoft, February 2012)

 

 

Not very much, to be sure, but I hope this is starting off in the right
direction at least.

 

The immediate priority is to discuss the timetable and resources for moving
this activity forward. Unfortunately I shall not have any time to work on
this before the Copenhagen meeting, so would prefer a longer timescale
leading up to having a full working draft in time for discussion at the
Seattle meeting. If anyone else (other than John and myself) would like to
work on this, we would obviously make more rapid progress.

 

Regards,

 

Francis

 

 

 

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