RE: Contents

[Dan Mueth <d-mueth uchicago edu>]

On Wed, 14 Jun 2000, Gregory Leblanc wrote:

> > Do you feel comfortable summarizing this for us? 
> 
> Not particularly, it was something very cool that I've looked at a little,
> but everything I know about it is from 20 minutes that I spent on the
> webpage.  I'll forward this on to Paul Jones, and perhaps he can write
> something that we can share with both the GDP and the LDP, to answer some of
> our questions.

That would be very helpful.  It sounds like his intention is to have a
standard all the open documentation groups can use, so if it is suitable,
hopefully we can all use it.

> I've got a question on this, specifically with the "multiple document
> versions" that you mention.  I'm not sure what kind of history is kept with
> this, if any at all.  Do you see some way of using this to help alleviate
> the problems with using online documentation that is a newer version than
> what pertains to the application installed on a users machine, and if so,
> how? 

I think this is meant to solve this problem.  It has a VERSION element
which has three attributes: VERSION.identifier, VERSION.date,
VERSION.description.  The first one is a document version number.  The
second is the release date.  And the third is a description of the
release, I suppose like a brief ChangeLog(?).  Perhaps we could add an
optional attribute such as VERSION.apversion which would describe which
version of the application this version of the document is meant to
describe(for documents which are tied to a particular application). This
would solve the versioning problem.  Your computer would first search the
local system for documentation with the given properties (TITLE,
VERSION.apversion, LANGUAGE).  If it does not find it, and the computer is
networked, it searches the network.  If it still doesn't find it, it looks
for the newest version less than the application version number(first
locally, then on the 'net).

This actually looks like a nice solution to a several of our problems.

Dan