VOTable 1.5 Working Draft (2023-09-13)

[Markus Demleitner]

Hi François,

On Mon, Oct 16, 2023 at 09:01:13PM +0200, Francois Ochsenbein wrote:
> Thank you Markus for this summary. I did notice the change in section 3.2
> "name, ID and ref attributes" and imagined that the change in COOSYS was
> the motivation ; you say it's an "unrelated issue" ; I'm just curious to
> learn more about this issue ? And among the "alternative proposals" you

It was this: https://github.com/ivoa-std/VOTable/issues/27 -- and as
I said, the general realisation that streaming VOTable metadata
sections is *very* hard given everything that has happened since
VOTable 1.1.

> are quoting the "Aladin method" — does topcat use a different method ?

I don't think TOPCAT tries to do epoch propagation, but I'll leave
further comments to Mark.

> And anyway the section 7 should be updated to reflect the changes before
> any recommendation. On the style I feel the suppression of space between
> paragraphs (the \parskip) makes reading somewhat uncomfortable (in a
> comparison between 1.4 and 1.5 versions).

Yeah, that's because Mark thankfully ported the whole thing to
ivoatex, which makes quite a few things simpler.  Changing my hat: As
ivoatex maintainer, I'm open to suggestions to change default styles.
The right place for that is over at docstd at ivoa.net (though I'll
admit that matters of taste and habit are usually hard to resolve
consensually).

In the VOTable case, since we're fiddling quite a bit with the
default layout and thus the lines are too long for my taste anyway,
and the parindent that ivoatex does by default to make paragraphs
more conspicuous is nixed, I'd absolutely not veto a parskip=0.5ex or
so.

         -- Markus