Project 3 Team Design Entry — Public Initiative Proposal

Overall, this schema was fairly easy to follow and work with. As expected, there were a few details that we encountered along the way that made the schema somewhat difficult to use. Many issues that we had rooted from lack of documentation or redundancies in the element definitions. Under the approach section, we found that the definitions for “execution” and “action” were so similar that we thought it might streamline the mark up to just eliminate these two attributes and leave the text under the “approach” heading. There were also a few places where it was difficult to identify what sub-elements or attributes were mandatory or optional. We noticed this when we were trying to write in our “scope” under the “purpose” section. We felt that “who” “what” and “when” should have been mandatory attributes (and the rest optional) in order to give an informative scope of the proposal. It also would help clearly define what a scope is and what information it should include.  

A minor bug we encountered was that the template model required a type=”___” attribute following approach and feasibility. However, when we defined these sections accordingly, it returned an invalid statement. As we discovered through the examples from the original group, approach and feasibility do not have a type=”__” attributes, but are instead defined within the paragraph itself as subelement. The change to the schema should reflect this difference in how the sections are defined.

One element that could potentially be added to the schema would be a global reference element. There is already a bibliography, so it would be useful to denote where each reference is used within the proposal. The <ref> would have an “author” attribute which would contain the author of the source in the bibliography it is that you are referencing. Another addition to the schema could be a “legal” and “other” subelement in the feasibility section in addition to the economic, social, and environmental elements. Therefore, the user of the schema would not just be limited to the three feasibility subelements already defined.