🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <appelt.720455954@hera> appelt@hera.gmd.de (Wolfgang Appelt) writes:
>  have to be added. (Group 4 fax is already included in ODA).

>- WG 3 is currently working very actively on hypermedia extensions of
>  the ODA standard where one of these extensions is the introduction
>  of the concept of time, e.g., each layout object receives a position
>  and duration on the time axis in addition to the current two-dimensional
>  spatial coordinates.

>- The usage of X.400 for transmitting ODA documents is already
>  addressed in Part 1 of the ODA standard.

Thanks for your very informative reply, but I am still puzzled by the
lack of convergence between these standards. 
And why include time in ODA when time is part of MHEG? Can't you converge  
  a) MHEG  
  b) ODA
  c) Group 4 fax, i.e. T.73 TIF.0 and TIF.1
  d) IPMS message bodies
By all means let's have 'profiles' to extract subsets of a common standard
for use in fax, e-mail, etc. Surely this is better than having four 
incompatible ways to produce multipart documents, each of which has unique
capabilities. It makes it hard to reason formally about things, or to write
simple rules for program behaviour. E.g. what (to the user) is the 
difference between a IPMS message containing two TIF.0 body parts each with
a single image, one TIF.0 body part with two images, one ODA body part with
two images, etc.? If a sending user says "send Fred these two pictures"
which form should be used? Should the recipient MUA present them differently?

What form does the collaboration between ODA and MHEG take? Is it simply 
a case of duplicating functions? Or is MHEG going to become an application
of (the new) ODA, in the way that HyTime is an application of SGML? (Or,
perhaps more accurately, in the way that SMDL is an application of HyTime.)

p.s. I saw a comment recently to the effect that participation in standards
efforts requires two out of: time, money and experience. I have none of them.
So please excuse my naive posting!