by Yushi KOMACHI
The activities of the XML Project have been reported to ITSIG in
The Report 7 showed the result of DTR ballot (terminated in Nov. 2002) on ISO/IEC TR 9573-11 2nd edition and the disposition of the ballot. The Report 7 included some discussions in the XML Adhoc meeting (April 2003) for the final text submitted in March 2003.
After the XML Adhoc meeting in April 2003, the editor and ISO/CS took a long time for finalizing the text and held again a face-to-face meeting in Geneva in Nov. 2003. ISO/CS requested that the rendered outputs should be strictly conforming to the ISO/IEC directives. Those requirements were classified into the issues of style specifications and the issues of rendering systems. The final text was revised to satisfy most of the requirements for style specifications.
In the beginning of March 2004, the editor and ISO/CS came to an agreement on the final proofreading and then the text was processed for publishing.
The ISO/IEC TR 9573-11 2nd edition, Information processing -- SGML support facilities -- Part 11: Structure descriptions and style specifications for standards document interchange, was published in April 2004 with the following structure:
The Annex G was added responding to the strong requirements of ISO/CS.
The TR is available in electronic forms, HTML version and PDF version. By using the TR, the following benefits of XML can be enjoyed:
ISO/IEC TR 9573-11 2nd edition provide XML and SGML DTDs for authoring and distributing ISO standards documents.
In addition the TR 9573-11 includes style specifications for all the elements defined by the DTD. The styles are based on the ISO/IEC Directives and the style specifications are described by DSSSL (ISO/IEC 10179) and XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language 1.0). Using the style specifications, the XML (and SGML) documents based on the DTD can easily be rendered for printing, displaying, or creating PDF files by a DSSSL or XSL processor.
The XSLT specification in the TR provides a conversion to HTML from XML to make it possible to preview XML texts of standards by ordinary HTML browsers.
In the former days of TR 9573-11 1st edition, SGML texts of standards were mainly dealt with in the ISO office, where a specific formatter had only to work on a particular style specification. Today, however, XML texts of standards can be created by editors, interchanged within drafting groups, forwarded to secretariat and distributed to users of the standards. In such distributed environments, style formatting is required by all the people involved and the rendered styles should be preserved in document distribution. Here the standardized style specifications are essential and the TR 9573-11 2nd edition can contribute for a number of standards users.
The editor notes that the XML DTD has an insufficient support for table and Math description because it is based on the former SGML DTD, and that the style specifications have not yet been enough checked by a number of actual standards documents described by XML or SGML.
Responding to user's comments to be provided, the editor will have to develop some corrigenda or amendments to the ISO/IEC TR 9573-11.
The DTDs and style specifications of the ISO/IEC TR 9573-11 can be processed by a number of XML/SGML tools, some of which are listed in Annex G of the TR.
An implementer of XML/SGML formatting tools reported his system at the XML Conference and Exposition 2003 of IDEAlliance held in Philadelphia, PA, US, Dec. 2003. The system was specially tuned for the style specifications defined in the ISO/IEC TR 9573-11.