IEEE Standards Association - Upload Ballot Comments

Upload Ballot Comments

Purpose

To provide balloting group members with procedures/instructions for preparing comments for single comment entry, and multiple-comment entry format, for upload into myBallot.

Procedure

You have arrived at this screen through clicking the "offline comment submittal" button on the "Manage myBallot Activity" screen. To enter multiple comments, complete the following four steps:

Step 1: Download one of the multiple comment templates displayed (xls, xml or csv). Enter your comments into the template in line with the following rules:

Use only ANSI standard ASCII characters (i.e., characters that can be normally typed on an American keyboard without using the ALT or CTRL keys).
Use Arial, Courier or Times New Roman fonts only.
While cut-and-paste from Notepad, Emacs or other text-processors is generally OK, do not cut-and-paste from Word or other word-processors.

Don't use font styles such as bold, italic, super or subscript, etc.

Step 2: Ensure that the data you enter in each field on the multiple comment entry spreadsheet conforms to the content and format requirements in the "Data Field Descriptions."

Data Field Descriptions

Category

- Choose General, Technical, or Editorial from the drop-down box.

Page

-This field requires numeric input -- use integers only. No roman numerals or alpha characters,decimal points, hyphens, slashes, etc., no ellipsis (i.e., 3 consecutive dots to indicate something has been left out) and no enhanced text (no bold, italic, underscore, etc.) will be accepted by the system. If you would like to reference a page that does not have a number, leave this field blank and enter the page description in the COMMENT field.

Sub-clause

- Enter the subclause number here -- here, you can use roman numerals, alpha characters, decimal points, etc.

Line #

- This field requires numeric input -- use integers only. No roman numerals or alpha characters,decimal points, hyphens, slashes, etc., and no enhanced text (no bold, italic, underscore, etc.) will be accepted by the system.

Comment

- Enter your comment here -- this field will hold up to 4000 characters.

Proposed Change

-- Your proposed change is entered here. This field will hold up to 4000 characters.

Must be Satisfied

-- You are requested to identify which of your comments, if any, associated with your Negative vote must be addressed to your satisfaction by the Ballot Resolution Committee for you to consider changing your Negative vote to Affirmative during the next recirculation of the ballot. For that reason, a "Must be Satisfied" box is provided to you by the system if you vote Negative. If you vote Affirmative or Abstain, the "Must be Satisfed" box will not be available. Procedures are as follows:

- Using Single Comment Entry. If your vote is Negative, the "Must be Satisfied" box will appear and will be checked (as a default) -- it means that you are classifying the specific comment as associated with your Negative vote. If you do not want your comment to be associated with your Negative vote, you should deselect (click) the "Must be Satisfied" box to remove the checkmark. If you have not yet voted, the data will be stored by the system until you submit a vote.

- Using Multiple Comment Entry (Spreadsheets). If you use Multiple Comment Entry and your vote is Approve or Abstain you should enter "No" in the "Must be Satisfied" column on the spreadsheet. If you enter "Yes" on the spreadsheet, the "Yes" will appear as greyed out in myProject when you upload your spreadsheet into the system. The greyed out "Yes" will convert to a full Yes only if your vote is Negative. If you have not yet voted, the data will be stored by the system until you submit a vote.

VOTE	MUST BE SATISFIED	EFFECT ON COMMENT
Affirmative or Abstain	Yes	Must be Satisfied does not apply to the affirmative or abstention vote and action on such comment is left to the discretion of the Sponsor.
Affirmative or Abstain	No	Must be Satisfied does not apply to the affirmative or abstention vote and action on such comment is left to the discretion of the Sponsor.
Negative	Yes	Comment is part of the reason for the commentor's negative vote and must be addrssed by the Sponsor in accordance with IEEE Policy 5.4.3.2
Negative	No	Comment is not part of the negative vote. Any comments that are explicitly identified not to be part of the negative vote shall be treated as as Affirmative comments, and action on such comments is left to the discretion of the Sponsor.

Step 3: When you have completed entering your text into the spreadsheet, save your spreadsheet with a unique file name to your hard drive.

Step 4: Upload your completed spreadsheet by clicking on Browse and choosing the spreadsheet from your hard drive. Upon submitting your comments, myProject will parse the information you supplied and place it into the comments area for easy viewing. As a text-based comment entry system, all formatting will be stripped out.

Rules for Submitting Comments Other Than Simple Text

Attach a File in Any Format Through Single-Comment Entry. To submit comments that include material other than simple text, such as Tables, Math Formulas, Figures, Graphics, pretty-print Software Listings, images, etc. you cannot use multiple comment entry. Such files must be placed in a Word Document and uploaded as an attachment to your comment, through the mechanism provided in Single Comment Entry. You may put the material for multiple comments into a single Word file and address each section as a single comment (e.g. Page 34 should use the figure on page 22 of the attached file); or you can attach a file to each specific comment.

Describe a Change Through Multiple Comment Entry. Because of the character restrictions in multiple comment entry, you may want to describe the change in words, rather than 'show' it. For example, instead of saying "The value of ... should be 6.25x103" (the superscript causes the problem) you could use 6.25x10e3 or 6.25x10exp3 or 6.25x103, all of which are equivalent expressions. Likewise sqrt(25) could be used in lieu of the square root symbol. Or 35u instead of the greek symbol mu.

Reasons for this Policy

The IEEE has no control over what applications are used to generate multiple comments or what applications will be used to receive multiple comments that are downloaded for offline processing.

While the ANSI standard ASCII character set (with character codes between 0 and 127) is well defined, how characters other than those are represented is extremely application dependent as well as dependent on what font is being used.

- As an example, the Yen symbol in the Microsoft Arial Font has exactly the same character code as the Infinity symbol in the Microsoft Symbol Font. Looking at just the character code (which is all CSV can do) it is impossible to tell which was intended.

- Similar issues arise when text is cut-and-pasted from Microsoft Word. The most common problem here is that things like smart punctuation (smart quotes, emdashes, non-breaking-spaces, etc) may get interpreted as actual printable characters, but not the characters intended.

- Text-based (such as Notepad or Emacs) or so-called programmer-editors which conform to the ASCII only rule can be cut-and-pasted from with relative assurance.

For Reaffirmation Ballots Only:

Balloters entering a negative vote will be implying that this standard is obsolete or contains erroneous information and thus should either be:

- Revised by the Working Group (with a new PAR submitted by the Working Group). A balloter who believes that the standard should be revised can request that his/her comments be included in the next revision of the standard at the discretion of the sponsor; or,

- Withdrawn -- the standard should be submitted for withdrawal.

Note that no changes may be made to the document during a reaffirmation ballot. If a balloter enters a negative vote because the balloter believes the standard is obsolete or contains erroneous information, the balloter should specify in his/her comments whether the balloter believes the standard should be revised or withdrawn, with details supporting his/her position.

Viewing and Revising Comments

1. Viewing Own Comments and Viewing Other Balloter's Comments

While the ballot is open, balloters can view their own comments but cannot view other balloters' comments.
After the ballot closes, the project normally goes to "Comment Resolution" stage. Then, balloters can view their own comments (but can no longer submit new comments), and cannot view other balloters' comments.

After "Comment Resolution" stage, the project then moves either to "Submitted to RevCom" stage or to "Recirculation" stage. In "Submitted to RevCom" stage, balloters can view their own comments, and view other balloters' comments. In "Recirculation" stage, while the ballot is open, balloters can submit and view their own comments and can view other balloters' comments from prior (closed) recirculations only (not the current circulation).

2. Revising/Deleting Own Comments

Balloters cannot revise comments they have submitted while the ballot is open or at any other time. The only way to revise a comment that has been submitted is to submit another comment containing the revision and this must be done while the ballot is open.
Balloters cannot delete comments after they have been submitted. If a comment has been submitted in error, the approach is to submit another comment explaining the incorrect comment.

Standard CSV Definition and Detailed Rules for Creating .csv Files From Applications Other Than Excel

Many applications can generate .csv files for export or receive them for import. In order to be imported properly, they must conform to the .csv Standard. (While CSV is not actually a standard in the sense that is recognized by ANSI or ISO as a consensus based definition, it does, however, have a broad-based accepted definition which some applications, notably Excel, either violate or augment).

CSV is a file format used as a portable, text only, representation of a database and conforms to the following rules. These rules are not complex and while it is possible to generate CSV files directly by using a text editor, it is recommended that they be generated by an appropriate application.
1. Each line is one entry or record and the fields in a record are separated by commas (some rare cases use semicolons).
2. Commas may be preceded or followed by arbitrary space and/or tab characters which are ignored.
3. If a field includes a comma or a new line, the whole field must be surrounded with double quotes.
  
  a. When the field is in quotes, the backslash character (\) must be used to enter certain characters.
  
  i. The quote (") character must be represented) by \"
  
  ii. The Backslash (\) character must be represented by \\
  
  iii. Linefeed, Carriage Return and Formfeed characters may be inserted by entering by \n, \r, \f respectively (note: myBallot and myProject will treat all three characters as newlines).
  
  iv. Tab characters may be inserted by entering \t
  
  v. Any other chararcter following a backslash will be treated as the character itself, ie."\z" is equivalent to "z".
  
  b. Text that comes after quotes that have been closed but come before the next comma will be ignored.
4. Empty fields are returned as as String of length zero: "".
5. Blank lines are always ignored and not uploaded
6. Lines starting with # or ! are always ignored and not uploaded

Detailed Rules for Using Excel: (e.g. uploading a .xls file)

Excel is a Microsoft propriatary application and the coding in the .xls files that it creates is parsed by yet another program that is used by myBallot and myProject. As long as you follow the simple rules for entering data in the Excel cells, you should have no problem. However, the following rules also apply:

Do not use merged columns or rows
Do not use cell justification (left/right/center)

Do not use font styles such as bold, italic, superscript, subscript, etc.

While cells are not intended to be formatted in general, you may Alt-Enter to force a new line (carriage return) in a cell. Note that Excel itself may strip off leading whitespace when it uploads.

In order to make the uploaded text more readable when rendered in the Web Browser, you may use \n to force a new line and \t to enter a tab (which moves to the next 8th character position). Note that these characters will appear in the Excel sheet, but will be replaced by the appropriate action on the Web Site.

Special Rules for Uploading .csv Files Generated from Excel

Because Excel files may be uploaded directly, it is best to upload them in their .xls format, using the Detailed Rules for Using Excel. If you want to use .csv, be aware that Excel does not conform to the standard CSV definition and that the .csv file will differ from other .csv files in that:

While blank lines are always ignored (not uploaded), there are no line comment characters which would signal that a line should be ignored vs the # and ! that are used in standard CSV
The CSV that Excel outputs differs from the generally accepted standard CSV standard in several respects:

- Leading and trailing whitespace is significant and will be retained.
- A backslash is not a special character and is not used to escape anything.
- Quotes inside quoted strings are escaped with a double quote rather than a backslash.

Excel may convert data before putting it in CSV format:

- Tabs are converted to a single space.
- New lines in the data are always represented as the UNIX new line. ("\n")
- Numbers that are greater than 12 digits may be represented in truncated scientific notation form.

ANSI Standard ASCII Character Set

Other than the first rows (the non-printing Control Codes), the remaining characters are the only ones that will be accepted without error when uploading Excel Files.

NUL

SOH

STX

ETX

EOT

ENQ

ACK

BEL

TAB

DLE

DC1

DC2

DC3

DC4

NAK

SYN

ETB

CAN

SUB

ESC

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