🚀 go-pugleaf

Lon,

I think you're a little confused.

When you speak of "the '88 standards", I believe you're referring to
CCITT documents, not ISO documents.  CCITT docs are considerably
cheaper than their ISO counterparts from the outset.  I've observed a
factor of three as the norm, with peaks as high as a factor of 20.

When you speak of "most of them except Internet RFC's", I'm not sure
what you mean.  Internet RFC's are not "standards".  They are not
published every four years, either, or yearly or any other fixed time
interval.

I'm quite certain it's "ANSI" with only one I, as opposed to one of
the more ubiquitous standards known as ASCII.

When you speak of ANSI "owning" the copyrights of all ITU standards in
the U.S., I believe you intended to indicate a licensing agreement.
Is this so?  Last I heard, Global Engineering had a license agreement
with ITU, and ANSI is rumored to have given Global exclusive right to
sell or duplicate their standards.

You ask about other countries.  I hope Norway qualifies.  I've bought
about two shelf-feet of CCITT's Blue Book and it's quite inexpensive.
Only $500 a shelf-foot or something in the vicinity thereof.  I've
also bought about three shelf-inches of ISO standards, and that
totalled $2,000, so we're talking $4,000 a shelf-foot.  Some of the
more perversely priced documents would extrapolate to $10,000 a
shelf-foot, but that's unusual.  Most notably, the ISO ODA specs cost
12 times more than the CCITT specs, and they are supposed to be
"technically aligned".  There are things in the ISO ODA which are not
in the CCITT ODA, but there are also issues of decency in pricing,
here.

I've wanted to acquire the ISO documents for MOTIS, but CCITT X.400
was available at 1/8 of the cost, so I bought that instead.  I also
wanted to acquire the ISO X.25 specifications because of the higher
quality of the description of several of the "sub-layers", but I've
had to shelve that.  I bought SGML and its amendment and associated
SDIF and registration stuff, and the TR (9573), and then I recently
bought two copies of Goldfarb's {The SGML Handbook} shipped with DHL
from London or maybe it was New York, never figured out, and both of
these books cost much less than the above mentioned standards.  Note
that this book _contains_ the ISO 8879 text, including amendment and
suggested improvements.

In my opinion, ISO's pricing policy is somewhere between insane and
mentally warped.  Also, I hate Helvetica for regular text, but that's
another of their wrong decisions, along with their insistance on two-
column text.  CCITT goes for what looks like Times Roman and has full-
page layout, and it's a lot easier to deal with.  I have one gripe
with CCITT, though: They make a lot of typos and even though I get
"corrigenda" sheets in the mail every four weeks or so, it's annoying.
I have found ISO with their incessant Amendments are even worse to
keep track of.  Finding out what section foo in the amended SGML said
was a real pain in the butt.

Here's one who would really appreciate electronic versions, and diffs
each time they made changes.  Not only would it be possible to find
out what the current version actually says, one could make hypertext
links into this mass of mangled English prose.  (Goldfarb's SGML
Handbook has made this possible, _on_paper_, and I'm really impressed.
I wish more publishers would get the idea.)

From what I've seen, there's no danger of the U.S. losing its
competitive position in ISO because of unfair pricing policies.

BTW, I'm not opposed to copyright on standards, restrictive dupli-
cation policies or covering costs, it's just that with a little more
sense of marketing these things, they could easily sell an order of
magnitude more of them and make a lot of money in the process.  If ISO
8859 was available in the bookstore, I'm sure several students over
here would have had their own copy, for instance.

The times when only manufacturers were interested in ISO standards are
gone.  ISO doesn't seem to have noticed its recent popularity.

--
[Erik Naggum]	Snail: Naggum Software / BOX 1570 VIKA / 0118 OSLO / NORWAY
		Mail: <erik@naggum.uu.no>, <enag@ifi.uio.no>
My opinions.	Wail: +47-2-836-863	Another int'l standards dude.