ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC34 N21

ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC34

Information Technology ---

Document Description and Processing Languages

TITLE:	Statement of Expected Benefits and Responsibilities: Request For Category C Liaison Between SC 34 and W3C
SOURCE:	Rudolf Riess
PROJECT:	All SC34 projects
PROJECT EDITOR:	All SC34 editors
STATUS:	SC34 approved document
ACTION:	For JTC1 approval
DATE:	10 November 1998
DISTRIBUTION:	SC34 and Liaisons
REFER TO:
REPLY TO:	Dr. James David Mason (ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34 Chaiman) Lockheed Martin Energy Systems Information Management Services 1060 Commerce Park, M.S. 6480 Oak Ridge, TN 37831-6480 U.S.A. Telephone: +1 423 574-6973 Facsimile: +1 423 574-0004 Network: masonjd@ornl.gov http://www.ornl.gov/sgml/wg4/ ftp://ftp.ornl.gov/pub/sgml/wg4/

Statement of Expected Benefits and Responsibilities: Request For Category C Liaison Between SC 34 and W3C

1 Introduction

SC 34 requests that JTC 1 approve a Category C liaison between SC 34 and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C.) This liaison is desired to facilitate work with W3C on the standardization of FCD 15 445 ISO-HTML, recently approved by JTC 1 as project 1.34.71 assigned to SC 34, as well as to implement the "Cooperative Agreement Between JTC 1 and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)" recently approved by JTC 1 in JTC 1 N 5287. This agreement uses the Category C liaison mechanism to implement some of its provisions.

2 Benefits of Category C Liaison

ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 deals with Standardization in the field of document structures, languages, and related facilities for the description and processing of compound and hypermedia documents, including languages for document logical structures and their support facilities; languages for describing document-like objects in web environments, document processing architecture and formatting for logical documents; languages for describing interactive documents; multilingual font information interchange and related services; final-form document architecture and page information interchange; hypermedia document structuring language and application resources API's for document processing.

There are several fronts on which close cooperation between ISO/IEC and W3C is highly desirable. The reason is to avoid duplication of effort, and to insure interoperability of Internet and WWW based system world-wide. Some specific areas of cooperation are:

Continue parallel development of XML and ISO 8879 and their supporting features.
Continue influence from ISO standards such as DSSSL and HyTime on XSL and XLL.

3 Cooperative Background

The W3C was founded in 1994 to develop common protocols for the evolution of the World Wide Web. JTC 1 SC 34 experts have been working informally with W3C for about three years. During this time th