🚀 go-pugleaf

Last year while I was in the DC area, I stopped by OMNICOM
to pick up some of our Blue Books that had just "Floated In"
(I.E. Slow Boat from Europe). I asked them about the chances
of these standards comming out in PostScript or another
common format (I'd take TROFF if it was available). They said
don't hold your breath for it in the next 5 years or so.

It seems that this has been discussed by the different groups
of Standards Bodies can not agree on what standard to publish
them in. I had gotten a Draft ISO to review and it was in PostScript
but there are no plans (as of last june) to let people FTP or
FTAM the standards.

Things might have changed since last June but since we are still
waioting for the 1988 Blue Books still (some are still not published)
I'm not holding my breath.


-- 
Bill Lewandowski		LORAL Western Development Labs
(408) 473-4362			Internet: wrl@wdl1.wdl.loral.com
FAX: (408) 473-7926		UUCP: wdl1!wrl

In article <9101150148.AA22136@uc.msc.edu> rusty@WIN1.IMS.ABB.COM ("Rusty Rowell") writes:
>>                                     ... Is the high cost of standards 
>> impeding efforts to adopt those standards?  Do you know less about OSI 
>> because you can't readily (cheaply) obtain standards specifications?
>
>Indirectly.  I am frequently annoyed by the fact that I can't get these 
>documents electronically as the TCP/IP RFC's.  ...
>I am working from hearsay, trade rags and Internet mailing lists.

I'll second that.  In addition, I'd like to point out the real value in
being able to use tools like grep on the RFCs; this is impossible with
the OSI documents.  Since they rarely have a very useful index, you sort
of have to just know where to find something, or do a linear search.

One problem I've had recently is that I'm trying to locate all the places
where numeric ASN.1 values are defined.  You know, things like:
	#define INTID       0x02        /* integer */
and	#define IPID        0x40        /* IpAddress */

These are easy to find in our .h files, but I'd like to know where the
authors found them, what other values may be officially defined, etc.
I think I found the above INTID, but I'm still looking for the place
that says that 0x40 is the code for an IP address, as well as just
exactly what bytes may follow this code.  (E.g., is it legal for an
IP address to be, say, 3 or 6 bytes long?  And what's the code that
says that a DECnet address follows?)

It'd be pretty easy to answer such questions if I could run a program
to chew up the documents and spit out interesting portions.  We're now
well into the age of electronic text-processing; when is ISO going to 
join the rest of the world?  (At least for networking standards? ;-)

By the way, there's been some thought within SIGCOMM about trying to
list how to get the DP and DS documents (i.e. listing the editors and
their e-mail addresses) in the regular Status of Standards section of
Computer Communication Review.  Would people consider this a useful
service?

Craig Partridge
Editor, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review

In article <19074@shlump.nac.dec.com> lan_csse@netrix.nac.dec.com (CSSE LAN Test Account) writes:
>In article <9101150148.AA22136@uc.msc.edu> rusty@WIN1.IMS.ABB.COM ("Rusty Rowell") writes:
>>>                                     ... Is the high cost of standards 
>>> impeding efforts to adopt those standards?  Do you know less about OSI 
>>> because you can't readily (cheaply) obtain standards specifications?
>>
>          ... In addition, I'd like to point out the real value in
>being able to use tools like grep on the RFCs; this is impossible with
>the OSI documents.  Since they rarely have a very useful index, you sort
>of have to just know where to find something, or do a linear search.

>It'd be pretty easy to answer such questions if I could run a program
>to chew up the documents and spit out interesting portions.  We're now
>well into the age of electronic text-processing; when is ISO going to 
>join the rest of the world?  (At least for networking standards? ;-)

One of my coworkers (Sandy Ressler) had a summer-student digitize a
huge standard (CALS, I think).  The scanner recovered almost all of
the text correctly.

He stored it on a Mac and made a little Hypercard stack as a wrapper
to access it, although of course, you can bypass that.  He added some
links by hand to show what could be done, but hypercard alone is
sufficient to do basic searching.  Also, from each card, you can click
on a button which takes you to the original digitized sample.  You can
also make annotations that other people on the network can see.

Last month, he pressed the whole thing onto a CD-ROM and gave out free
samples at the recent CALS conference.  I think the hardest part of
the project was making sure the disc could be read by both DOS and Macs!

Anyway, it just shows you what can be done with a week of scanning and
cheap student labor.  It's rather silly that he couldn't start from
a machine-readable copy in the first place, but as we all know that is
rather typical when it comes to standards.  (Although in this case, I
believe CALS is not copyrighted.)  You might consider this solution if
you REALLY want to do on-line searching through standards (and you
don't want to wait 5 years for the standards bodies to come around.)

Unfortunately, I don't recall where he has published this work, but it
is referred to as "hyperstandard".  The project seems to have been
well received and is continuing.

Don Libes          libes@cme.nist.gov      ...!uunet!cme-durer!libes