Activity Report, Plan and Discussion of XML Project

2000/02/08
Y. Komachi

1. Background

• SGML(ISO 8879:1986) has been introduced for electronic (logical) documents interchange of ISO standards.

  The SGML DTD for ISO standards is published as ISO/IEC TR 9573-11, which has been adopted as national or regional standards, e.g., DIN V 33 900, JIS/TR X 0004 and IMPACT Eurostand-SGML-1155 D/3-b22.

• XML was developed by W3C for logical documents interchange particularly in web environment.

• There have been developed a number of XML tools, some of which are free softwares.

2. Purpose of Introducing XML to ITSIG

• Web (and online) distribution of logical documents of ISO standards.

  Logical documents are indispensable for editing and balloting draft standards.

• Inexpensive system realization for editing/drafting ISO documents.

  XML tools are much more inexpensive than SGML tools.

3. Activities of XML project in JSA

• JSA developed the XML DTD (ver.2k01) for standards documents, being based on the DTD of ISO/IEC TR 9573-11.

• Considering the fact that:

  • (1) Documents are interchanged in web environments. Web documents are reviewed basically on a display. However, the DTD should be developed considering a compatibility with printing documents.
  • (2) Style specification should be dealt with separately.

4. Plan

• Finalize the XML DTD in accordance with the discussions with ISO/ITSIG experts (see the discussion issues shown in "Design Principle of XML DTD for standards documents").

• The XML DTD will be submitted to ISO for publication as an ISO standard or technical report.

• Develop style specification for the XML DTD

  Candidate of the Style Language

  Language	Scope	Full(Sub)Set Implementation
  (1) DSSSL	Printing Doc.	DSSSL Print (JADE)
  (2) CSS2	Web Doc./Multimedia Doc.	(IE)
  (3) XSL (Working draft)	Web Doc.	?
  (4) XSL (IE5 version)	Web Doc.	IE5

  NOTE: Even for logical documents distribution, style specified rendering is important for obtaining high readability.

• The style specification will also be submitted to ISO for publication as an ISO standard or technical report (In this case the style language has to be an ISO approved standard like DSSSL (ISO/IEC 10179)?).

5. For Information

JSA developed DSSSL specification for standards documents defined by JIS/TR X 0004 (Japanese version of ISO/IEC TR X 9573-11). The DSSSL Specification is based on the JIS Style defined by JIS Z 8301 and works on JADE. The DSSSL specification has been published as JIS/TR X 0013.

The draft version of the DSSSL specification was reported in 5th ITSIG/TSG, 1998-06-22: "DSSSL Application for a JIS Publishing System".

For only demonstration of style specification for web document, the XML Project in JSA has developed an simple XSL(IE5 version) specification for XML document.

The example of XML document instance is the first several clauses of ISO/IEC 10179: DSSSL.