Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!cs.utexas.edu!asuvax!ncar!mephisto!mcnc!decvax.dec.com!deccrl!bacchus.pa.dec.com!shlump.nac.dec.com!ryn.esg.dec.com!uninet!uninet.dec.com!morris From: morris@uninet.dec.com (Tom Morris) Newsgroups: comp.text.sgml Subject: Re: ODA encoded in SGML Message-ID: <1990Sep27.135115@uninet.dec.com> Date: 27 Sep 90 12:58:41 GMT References: Sender: news@uninet.vbo.dec.com Reply-To: morris@casee.enet.dec.com Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation, Valbonne, France Lines: 33 Mark Sherman forwarded a message from Frank Dawson about a recent NIST ODA SIG meeting where among other things they did the following: |> The Working Agreements for all three DAPs have been modified to support |> in one specification both the ODIF (binary encoding based on ISO |> 8824/8825, ASN.1) and the ODL/SDIF (clear text encoding based on ISO |> 8879, SGML) interchange formats. Support for the SGML encoding of |> ODA is perceived as a requirement in North America for acceptance of |> ODA documents. The recent NIST sponsored Electronic Document |> Processing Confererence on July 30, 1990 explicitly emphasized this |> requirement. This seems to raise the possibility that instead of having just two document interchange "standards", we'll have four when you take into account the various combinations of low level encodings and high level document formats. This isn't even taking into account the arguments put forward by those who say that SGML is really more of a meta-standard then something which will actually allow effective document interchange which would imply that the number of "standards" is going to grow even more. Does NIST really think this is in the users' best interest, or even the vendors' best interest for that matter? How many "standards" does it take in a single problem space before they are no longer really standards? Tom -- Tom Morris morris@casee.enet.dec.com Digital Equipment, Centre Technique Europe S.A.R.L DTN 828-5729 B.P. 129 - Sophia Antipolis Tel. +33 92 95 57 29 06561 Valbonne Cedex - France Fax +33 93 65 41 58 My opinions, not my employer's