XML Conference Schema Documentation

Keywords: conference , documentation , DocBook , authoring , schema

Dr Lauren Wood
Chair, XML 2005 Conference
Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Vancouver
British Columbia
Canada
http://www.laurenwood.org/

      

Biography

Lauren Wood chairs the XML 2005 conference. She is also a Senior Technical Program Manager at Sun Microsystems Inc. Her resume is at Textuality and her blog is named Anyway.

Note that the honorific element is not needed, but you can use it if you wish. There is also a lineage element for name suffixes (Jr., etc.) that is used after the surname. The otheraddr element is used for web addresses, such as for your company or your blog.


Abstract


This is the documentation to accompany the DocBook subset used for the proceedings for the XML 2005 Conference. It includes some examples of use, and in fact the entire document is written as a sample proceedings paper.


Table of Contents


1. Introduction
2. Character Encodings
3. Types of Elements
     3.1 Overall Structure
     3.2 Block Elements
          3.2.1 Code Example
          3.2.2 Blockquote Example
          3.2.3 Note Example
     3.3 Inline Elements
     3.4 Keywords
     3.5 Lists
          3.5.1 List examples
     3.6 Tables
          3.6.1 Table Example
     3.7 Figures and Examples
          3.7.1 Figure Examples
               3.7.1.1 Simple figure, no title or caption
               3.7.1.2 Formal figure with title and caption
               3.7.1.3 Example of a Formal Example
     3.8 Links and References
     3.9 Bibliographical Entries
     3.10 Miscellaneous
          3.10.1 Acronyms
          3.10.2 Footnotes
4. Generated Text
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Footnotes

1. Introduction

The conference proceedings schema is a subset of DocBook. This subset has been cut down substantially from the full DocBook schema; for example CALS tables are not allowed. This makes authoring and processing the papers easier than if we were to allow all DocBook elements to be used. Papers must validate according to this subset in order to be accepted by the conference submission system and processed into the proceedings. The final proceedings may not look precisely like the preview version on the conference web site, but will be fairly close. Papers should be at least 2000 words long. Longer papers are welcome; generally at least 2500 words are needed to adequately cover the subject matter.

The following documentation includes notes on some of the elements used in the conference subset. You may also wish to refer to the DocBook web site, where there is much more documentation.

If you're reading the HTML version of this document, you should also look at the XML version (schema_documentation.xml) for some of the examples.

2. Character Encodings

All proceedings documents should use Unicode, either UTF-8 or UTF-16. Other character encodings are not supported. Numeric character entities may be used; named character entities are not supported in this subset of DocBook.

3. Types of Elements

3.1 Overall Structure

Each proceedings paper is one article element. This contains one articleinfo element (with author information, the abstract, and keywords) and one or more paragraphs or sections. The paper can finish with appendices, acknowledgements, and a bibliography.

3.2 Block Elements

The basic paragraph element is para. Paragraphs may be contained within sections (section) and in various other locations. Sections embedded in other sections automatically become subsections.

The other types of paragraphs you may wish to use are blockquote, which is used for block quotations, or note, which is typically preceded by the word "Note:". Block quotations and notes contain para elements.

Long code examples should be put within a programlisting element, which also ensures the linebreaks are preserved. Please make sure the contents of these code examples will fit easily on one printed line (for the PDF version); we recommend using no more than 70 characters per line. Also, don't use tabs in these code examples, as they will be converted to spaces and the conversion process may destroy the code layout. If your software tool does pretty-printing of the XML, you will probably need to turn this off for the code examples. If you wish to make a formal example with a title, use the example element (see Section 3.7 ).

3.2.1 Code Example

Programlisting keeps the line breaks and 
formats the text
using a suitable font...
for code.

3.2.2 Blockquote Example

Blockquotes don't keep the line breaks you give them, but you can put in paragraphs. To keep the linebreaks without changing the font, use the literallayout element.

If you use literallayout,
     It will allow you with might
To write poetry throughout
     Even if it isn't very bright.

3.2.3 Note Example

NOTE: Notes usually have the word "Note" before them.

This is a Note Title: “Note” is just the default title, you can have your own title.

3.3 Inline Elements

The inline presentation elements such as big or i have been replaced with the emphasis element. The various types of emphasis are given by the role attribute, which can have values of italic, bold, big, small, with italic being the default.

There are other inline text elements that you may find useful. The definitions were taken from the online DocBook documentation - see [DocBook] for more details.

code
An inline code fragment
command
The name of an executable program or other software command
filename
The name of a file
literal
Inline text that is some literal value
quote
An inline quotation
sgmltag
A component of SGML or XML markup
subscript
A subscript
superscript
A superscript

3.4 Keywords

Keywords (using the keyword element) should be put in a keywordset element within the articleinfo element. They fit between the author information and the abstract. The content of the keyword element does not appear in the final rendered output, but is used as an index. Please use keywords from the list available on the conference website, and put each keyword in a separate element. Feel free to use your own keywords as well; if you think other people may want to use the same keywords, please email Lauren Wood (lauren@textuality.com) or David Kunkel dkunkel@idealliance.org) to add these to the standard list.

3.5 Lists

There are three main different types of lists: numbered, bulleted, and definition lists. The numbered and bulleted lists can have various types of numbering schemes or bullets associated with them for styling. Since styling in HTML is done using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), this subset of DocBook uses the CSS list-style-type values to define the types of bullets available for unordered lists.

Use the itemizedlist element for bulleted lists. There is an attribute on that element called mark with values disc (closed bullet), circle (open circle), and square (solid square) that define the types of bullets available.

The orderedlist element for numbered lists uses the attribute numeration to change the numbering style. It has the values arabic, upperalpha, upperroman, loweralpha, lowerroman (with the results: arabic 1, 2, 3, 4,...; upperalpha A, B, C, D,... ; upperroman I, II, III, IV,... ; loweralpha a, b, c, d,..; lowerroman i, ii, iii, iv,...). Both of these types of lists use the same listitem element, so it's easy to change from one type into another.

Definition lists are used for definitions and have varlistentry elements which contain terms (term) and definitions (listitem).

Every list type can have a title.

3.5.1 List examples

The numbered, bulleted, and simple lists are shown here; for examples of what the definition or variable entry lists look like, see Section 3.3 .

  1. First list item (this list in Upper Roman numbering style)
    1. One (this list in lower alphabetical numbering style)
      DocBook
      Schema widely used for technical documentation.
      Schema
      List of rules that an XML instance must obey in order to be processed correctly. May be implicit or explicit.
    2. Two
    3. Three
      1. this list in arabic numbering style
      2. And another item in the arabic numbered list

3.6 Tables

DocBook uses a similar table module to HTML 4.01. Nested tables are not allowed in table cells. CALS tables are not permitted in this subset of DocBook. There are two types of tables, the informaltable element and the table element. Both types of tables can have thead, tbody, col, and colgroup, and also contain tr/td/th elements. table elements have generated titles of the form "Table 1: " and a mandatory caption while informaltable elements have no titles or captions.

3.6.1 Table Example

The amount of caffeine in various coffee drinks; taken from Frequently Asked Questions about Caffeine.
Beverage mg of Caffeine per 7oz serving
Drip 115-175
Espresso 1 serving (1.5-2oz) 100
Brewed 80-135
Instant 65-100
Decaf, brewed 3-4
Decaf, instant 2-3

Table 1

A simple (informal) table
has no title
or caption

3.7 Figures and Examples

There are a number of ways to put figures into your paper. You can have simple figures, with no title or caption, or figures that have titles. You can also have formal examples with titles. Images for inclusion in the proceedings paper must be in one of the formats JPG, GIF, PNG, SVG, or SVGZ. The rendered size of the images must be smaller than 7" (17.5cm) wide by 9" (23cm) high, or 600 pixels wide by 800 pixels high, to fit on the PDF version of the proceedings. The imagedata element allows three ways to size your images; please see the DocBook documentation at imagedata for details. Images that are larger than allowed may be sent back to the author for resizing, automatically scaled down in size, or clipped.

All figures use the mediaobject element; formal figures are wrapped with a figure element and have a title element. The "Figure x." is generated automatically for formal figures but not for simple figures.

If you wish to link to simple figures, use the link element and provide your own text.

I'm linking to the first figure.

3.7.1 Figure Examples

3.7.1.1 Simple figure, no title or caption
xml05.jpg
3.7.1.2 Formal figure with title and caption
xml05.jpg

A caption explaining the figure; if you're going to have a caption you must use a title as well.

Figure 1: The XML Conference Logo

3.7.1.3 Example of a Formal Example
this isn't really
code but should show
the point

Example 1: this example has a title

3.8 Links and References

The ulink element is used to reference an external web-based document. The URI value in the url attribute will be treated as a link in the HTML version, and printed in the PDF version of the proceedings.

Example start…

Please see <ulink url="http://www.xmlconference.org">the conference web site</ulink>.

            …end example.

To generate a cross reference within your paper, use the xref element. Set the value of the linkend attribute to match the value of the target element's id attribute. The appropriate text and/or links (depending on output medium) will be generated at the location of the xref element.

All elements that have an id attribute may be cross referenced using the xref element.

Bibliography entries ( Section 3.9 ), footnotes ( Section 3.10.2 )and acronyms ( Section 3.10.1 ) (all of which use some type of referencing) are documented later.

3.9 Bibliographical Entries

The bibliography is a list of the bibliographical references you have used in the paper (including web sites). The list with the full details for each item you refer to (full URI, publisher, author, etc) is in the rear matter part of the paper, in the bibliography element. Each separate item is in its own bibliomixed element, with an id attribute whose value is used for the references. The bibliomixed element contains an abbrev element, where you put the item label you want to show up in the paper, as well as other content which contains the information about title, author, publisher, web site, etc. Although full DocBook does allow the xreflabel attribute to be used for item labels, this usage is deprecated for this conference subset as attributes can't be properly internationalized, whereas elements can.

You put references in the body of the paper to those items using the xref element. The linkend attribute value must match the id attribute of the bibliomixed element you're referencing. The content of the referenced abbrev element will be put in the processed paper in place of the xref element. The square brackets will be automatically generated.

Since the content model of bibliomixed is mixed content, you have to be careful with white space. The processing may turn newlines into spaces, or join two spaces together. You must add any punctuation such as commas yourself; the system does not add this information. If the bibliography preview doesn't look right, try adding the punctuation.

Note that we recommend a relatively light style - you don't need to mark up author information with elements, for example. There are also different ways of putting links in the entries - either in the bibliomisc element (which is a slightly better solution), or directly in the citetitle element. Please author titles using initial capital letters only. Do not use all capital letters except for acronyms. If you are referencing books or other printed material, please include the full title, authors, publisher, and year of publication, and, if appropriate, volume number and/or page. The bibliography examples are placed at the end of this document so you can also see how they are processed.


    <bibliography>
    <bibliomixed id="DocBook"><abbrev>DocBook</abbrev><citetitle> <ulink
url="http://www.docbook.org">DocBook documentation</ulink>.</citetitle>
</bibliomixed>
      <bibliomixed id="COMP97">
        <abbrev>COMP97</abbrev>
	<citetitle>Computer Graphics,</citetitle> J. D. Foley et al., 
	<publishername>Addison-Wesley</publishername>, <pubdate>1997</pubdate>.
      </bibliomixed>
      <bibliomixed id="COMP90">
        <abbrev>COMP90</abbrev>
        <citetitle>Computer Graphics Principles and Practice,</citetitle> J. D. Foley et al., 
	<publishername>Addison-Wesley</publishername>, <pubdate>1990</pubdate>.
      </bibliomixed>
      <bibliomixed id="ECMA">
        <abbrev>ECMA</abbrev>
        <citetitle>ECMAScript Language Specification,</citetitle> <publishername>ECMA General Assembly</publishername>, 
	<pubdate>June 1997</pubdate>. 
	Available at <bibliomisc><ulink url="http://www.el-mundo.es/internet/ecmascript.html"/></bibliomisc>.
      </bibliomixed>
      <bibliomixed id="GraphicOM">
        <abbrev>GraphicOM</abbrev>
          <citetitle>Common graphical object models and how to translate them to SVG</citetitle>, P. A. Mansfield, SVG Open 2002 Conference Paper, <pubdate>16 July 2002</pubdate>. Available at
			 <bibliomisc><ulink url="http://www.svgopen.org/papers/2002/mansfield__graphical_object_models/"/></bibliomisc>.
      </bibliomixed>
      <bibliomixed id="GS">
        <abbrev>GS</abbrev>
          <citetitle>Graphical Stylesheets: Using XSLT to Generate SVG</citetitle>, P. A. Mansfield, D. W. Fuller, XML 2001 Conference Paper, 
	  <pubdate>13 December 2001</pubdate>. Available at
			 <bibliomisc><ulink url="http://www.idealliance.org/papers/xml2001/papers/html/05-05-02.html"/></bibliomisc>.
      </bibliomixed>
      <bibliomixed id="PtPoly">
        <abbrev>PtPoly</abbrev>
        <citetitle>Fastest Point in Polygon Test,</citetitle> MacMartin, Stuart et al, Ray Tracing News <issuenum>5</issuenum> <pagenums>(3)</pagenums>, <pubdate>1992</pubdate>.
      </bibliomixed>
      <bibliomixed id="SVG">
        <abbrev>SVG</abbrev>
        <citetitle>Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.0 Specification,</citetitle> J. Ferraiolo, editor, W3C Recommendation, 
	<pubdate>4 September 2001</pubdate>. Available at <bibliomisc><ulink url="http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG"/></bibliomisc>.
      </bibliomixed>
      <bibliomixed id="VRML">
        <abbrev>VRML</abbrev>
        <citetitle>Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML),</citetitle> International Standard ISO/IEC 14772-1:1997, 
	<publishername>VRML Consortium Incorporated</publishername>, <pubdate>1997</pubdate>. 
	Available at <bibliomisc><ulink url="http://www.web3d.org/technicalinfo/specifications/vrml97/index.htm"/></bibliomisc>.
      </bibliomixed>
      <bibliomixed id="X3D">
        <abbrev>X3D</abbrev>
        <citetitle>Extensible 3D Graphics (X3D)</citetitle>. 
	Available at <bibliomisc><ulink url="http://www.web3d.org/x3d.html"/></bibliomisc>.
      </bibliomixed>
    </bibliography>

3.10 Miscellaneous

3.10.1 Acronyms

Example start…

IDEAlliance (formerly the <acronym>GCA</acronym> Graphic Communications Association) is a non-profit industry association.

The XML standard was first announced at a <acronym >GCA</acronym> conference in 1996.

processes as:

IDEAlliance (formerly the GCA Graphic Communications Association) is a non-profit industry association. The XML standard was first announced at a GCA conference in 1996.

            …end example.

You don't need to define well-known acronyms such as XML, but defining more rather than fewer is beneficial.

3.10.2 Footnotes

When text requires a footnote, use the footnote element at the point where the footnote should occur. The footnote marks will be automatically generated, so don't put these in. If you think you might want to reuse the content of the footnote, put a value in the id attribute on the footnote element. Then you can use the footnoteref element's linkend attribute to reference that footnote.

Example start…

He was not himself that day<footnote id="fn01"><para>01 January 2001</para></footnote>.

On that fateful day<footnoteref linkend="fn01"/>, he woke up late.

processes as:

He was not himself that day [1] . On that fateful day [1] , he woke up late.

            …end example.

4. Generated Text

When processed into HTML or PDF, the elements listed here automatically generate the required text. Therefore, please do not insert the following text items in your paper within these elements.

abstract
ABSTRACT
ackno
Acknowledgements
bibliography
Bibliography
personblurb
Biography
country
space before
email
email:(space)
figure
Figure #
footnote
superscript footnote number or other footnote annotation
footnoteref
superscript number of footnote referenced (or other footnote annotation)
listitem
(in an itemizedlist) - arabic, lower alpha, upper alpha, lower roman or upper roman counter
listitem
(in an orderedlist) - bullet or dash
note
Note:(space)
state
comma and space before
subtitle
colon and space before
lineage
comma and space before
surname
space before
table
Table #
ulink in orgname
web site: (space)
xref
[link to the referenced point]

Acknowledgements

Many thanks for helping define and create the DocBook subset to Eve Maler, Norm Walsh, Philip Mansfield, and Benjamin Jung. Thanks again to Norm Walsh for helping to refine for 2005.

Bibliography

[DocBook]
DocBook documentation.
[COMP97]
Computer Graphics, J. D. Foley et al., Addison-Wesley, 1997.
[COMP90]
Computer Graphics Principles and Practice, J. D. Foley et al., Addison-Wesley, 1990.
[ECMA]
ECMAScript Language Specification, ECMA General Assembly, June 1997. Available at http://www.el-mundo.es/internet/ecmascript.html.
[GraphicOM]
Common graphical object models and how to translate them to SVG, P. A. Mansfield, SVG Open 2002 Conference Paper, 16 July 2002. Available at http://www.svgopen.org/papers/2002/mansfield__graphical_object_models/.
[GS]
Graphical Stylesheets: Using XSLT to Generate SVG, P. A. Mansfield, D. W. Fuller, XML 2001 Conference Paper, 13 December 2001. Available at http://www.idealliance.org/papers/xml2001/papers/html/05-05-02.html.
[PtPoly]
Fastest Point in Polygon Test, MacMartin, Stuart et al, Ray Tracing News 5 (3), 1992.
[SVG]
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.0 Specification, J. Ferraiolo, editor, W3C Recommendation, 4 September 2001. Available at http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG.
[VRML]
Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), International Standard ISO/IEC 14772-1:1997, VRML Consortium Incorporated, 1997. Available at http://www.web3d.org/technicalinfo/specifications/vrml97/index.htm.
[X3D]
Extensible 3D Graphics (X3D). Available at http://www.web3d.org/x3d.html.

Footnotes

  1. 01 January 2001

XHTML rendition made possible by SchemaSoft's Document Interpreter™ technology.