Xref: utzoo news.groups:22426 comp.text:7011 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!uupsi!sunic!nuug!ifi!skakke.uio.no!enag From: enag@ifi.uio.no (Erik Naggum) Newsgroups: news.groups,comp.text Subject: Re: call for discussion: comp.text.sgml Message-ID: Date: 13 Jul 90 18:37:10 GMT References: <2498@loria.crin.fr> Sender: news@ifi.uio.no Followup-To: news.groups,comp.text Organization: Naggum Software, Oslo, Norway Lines: 58 In-reply-to: emv@math.lsa.umich.edu's message of 11 Jul 90 00:57:25 GMT Edward Vielmetti asks: > Are ODA and ODL available from standards organizations? ODA is available from your favorite ISO outlet as ISO 8613 (8 parts), and costs an incredible amount of money. That's where I foolishly bought it before I discovered that... ODA is also available from your favorite CCITT outlet as Blue Book Volume VII, fascicle VII.6, Terminal equipment and protocols for telematic services, T.400-T.418, and costs a nominal CHF 47 (or CHF 57 if you order it from CCITT yourself). ISO 8613 and the T.400-series are supposedly identical, as per ISO 8613-1, Annex B, Relationships with other standards, B.2 Other standards, section B.2.1, second paragraph: | The text of ISO 8613-1 to ISO 8613-8 are identical to the texts in | the correspondingly numbered CCITT Recommendations T.411 to T.418 | except for mandated stylistic differences and provisions of ISO 8613 | that are outside the scope of these Recommendations. I've been walking around in the CCITT (Red,Blue) Books, and it was quite disturbing to find that ODA's so expertly hidden as a "telematic service". You can save a good number of dollars by not buying from ISO. I don't know anything about what the "provisions ... outside the scope of these Recommendations" refer to. ODL is defined in ISO 8613-1, 3. Definitions: | 3.124 Office Document Language; ODL (abbreviation): A Standard | Generalized Markup Language (SGML, ISO 8879) application for | representing documents conforming to ISO 8613. A German "expert group" who contributed to the ISO 9069 Technical Report noted that SGML covers much wider applications than ODA does, and that the entire ODA document structures can be expressed with ease in SGML (hence ODL), while SGML documents would easily overflow the limits of ODA. The extremely useful Marked Sections, for instance, have no counterpart in ODA, and multiple concurrent documents don't exist in ODA, although ODA has two concurrent documents structures. It should be noted that ODL is an SGML _application_. (I don't have the German paper anymore, but can probably find a reference to the book it was going to be, or is, part of, if somebody is interested.) > What is special about them that makes them more suited for your > task? I can't answer for the person you ask, but ODA has defined a set of fixed layouts and such that makes it easier to accomplish "inter- working between conforming systems". (I love that phrase!) Also, ODA is encoded in the ASN.1 "Basic Encoding Rules", and I'm told that it's easier to parse than SGML, but some of those who work with ASN.1 around here vehemently denies that ASN.1 is easy to parse, so I don't know -- I haven't looked into it, really, but to end on a quote of mine: "I've always liked data representations that I can read, and oscillo- scopes and hex dumps don't count." -- [Erik Naggum]