SC34 WG4 Meeting, Bellevue

WG4 has been meeting in Bellevue, Washington the last three days, as part of a full week of activities around the upcoming SC34 plenary here this Thursday.  We wrapped up the meeting with a half-day this morning (Tuesday), after meeting all day on Sunday and Monday.

WG4 covered a variety of topics in this week’s meetings.  I won’t get into great detail on those, because some of these topics are still open and WG4 deliberations will continue in future calls and meetings, but here are a few of the more interesting topics we covered: 

• The past, present and future of Strict and Transitional; WG4 is working toward consensus on the long-term intent of this distinction, to help guide future work on new functionality and other maintenance activities.
• The W3C “Widgets 1.0: Packaging and Configuration” candidate recommendation, and how it compares/contrasts to OPC.
• Possible use of Assembla for tracking defect reports and maintaining the IS29500 schemas.
• Open defect reports on media types, fonts, and custom XML, discussed proposed resolutions, and closed most of the DRs we covered.
• Issues around ISO 8601 dates, including how to define a profile of the 8601 standard for use in IS29500, and the question of whether ISO 8601 dates should be removed from Transitional.
• Various options for addressing the unqualified attributes issue that has been raised by the Czech Republic.
• How future reprints and revisions to the standard will be handled, and how  the upcoming changes to the ISO/IEC Directives will affect that work.

In addition to the 20-25 people in the  room each day, we had a few people call in to contribute and participate.  Especially noteworthy, in my opinion, were the phone contributions from Japan’s Toshiya Suzuki (who was on the phone from roughly 2:00AM to 9:00AM his time) and Denmark’s Jesper Lund Stocholm, who juggled LiveMeeting, a phone call, and a 2-month-old baby with aplomb.  Thanks for calling in, guys.

We also had two presentations from invited Microsoft experts.  Zeyad Rajabi covered custom XML, and Jeff Chen covered Markup Compatibility and Extensibility.  This gave WG4 members an opportunity to ask questions of subject-matter experts in these areas, to help inform future maintenance activities.

Other SC34 working groups are also meeting here this week prior to the Thursday plenary, including WG5 (ODF-OXML translation), WG3 (topic maps), and WG1 (validation).  This afternoon and tomorrow, I’m attending AHG3, the ad-hoc group looking into ODF maintenance and how SC34 and OASIS can work together on maintenance going forward.  I’m going to also try to spend some time with WG5 if I can (which is meeting at the same time as AHG3), and then Thursday is the SC34 plenary itself, and Friday we have a DII workshop over in Redmond on the Microsoft campus.  Busy week.

I’ll cover some of these topics in more detail after decisions are made in WG4 and/or relevant resolutions are approved in the SC34 plenary.