🚀 go-pugleaf

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,
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