Guidelines and Procedures note and version numbers

[Marco C. Leoni]

Hi Everybody,

    The most labour intensive part for the DC is reformatting documents to/from 
HTML, especially if the input HTML is automatically generated by some word 
processor. I'd like to propose the following section to clarify how to go about 
this.


2. Document Format

    The official format for IVOA documents is HTML. Templates in this 
format can be found at http://www.ivoa.net/Documents/templates.

    An automatic procedure is used to convert HTML documents into other 
common formats (PDF, MS-WORD). If the resulting output of this procedure 
is not satisfactory, the Document Coordinator will assist the Author(s) 
in producing the initial Working Draft version 1.0 from which such a 
loss less conversion is possible. In any case the Author(s) will be 
informed about the technical problem and advised to use the massaged 
html document as the baseline for future updates.

    If the authors prefer to work from a different baseline thereafter 
the conversion to other formats will be performed only if the output is 
complete and therefore consistent with the original and if this can be 
achieved without manual editing of the original.




- About version numbers

First of all, the standard process is about document specification, 
whereas software implementation is something different.


Having said that, let me recall a discussion Tony, Ray and myself had some time ago:

"[...] I would prefer:    http://www.ivoa.net/xml/VOResource/v0.9

Since the status as working draft is irrelevant for the namespace - it *IS*

the namespace we are using for that schema, it is not a working draft, it is actual.

[...]
We cannot guarantee a 1:1 relationship between schema and document so it is
pointless to tie the schema namespace to any document naming scheme."  [Tony]


This should explain why we do not want to have the same numbering for documents and xml files.


By the way, having ten possibilities to go from one level to another should be sufficient, 
simply requires some attention in producing a new *document*.



Cheers,
    Marco