From masonjd@y12.doe.gov Fri May 25 10:38:55 2007 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Date: Fri, 25 May 2007 13:37:13 -0400 From: "Mason, James David (MXM)" Subject: RE: NamingDIS29500-Durusau-12 In-reply-to: <4654C023.3020706@durusau.net> To: patrick@durusau.net, Dave Welsh , Doug Mahugh , Frank Farance , Jerry Smith , Jon Bosak , "Levine, Leonard F CIV DISA GES-E" , Norm Walsh , "Lynne A. Price" , Rex Jaeschke , Richard Barber , Robert Weir , Steve Carton , Tim Schoechle , Kevin Trainor , Eduardo Gutentag X-MIMEOLE: Produced By Microsoft Exchange V6.5 Content-class: urn:content-classes:message Thread-topic: NamingDIS29500-Durusau-12 Thread-index: AcedlsOo2ct7UuvGSKSaS5K6D+9DnQBUhPoA X-PMX-Version: 5.2.0.264296 X-MS-Has-Attach: X-MS-TNEF-Correlator: X-OriginalArrivalTime: 25 May 2007 17:37:15.0542 (UTC) FILETIME=[55B38B60:01C79EF3] Patrick's comments in his document NamingDIS29500-Durusau-12.pdf remind me of a previous naming issue in this committee: ISO/IEC 8613, "ODA". What ODA meant changed over time. It started as "Office Document Architecture" and wound up as "Open Document Architecture"; neither was adequately defined. When the ODA project was started, it was the primary work of X3V1. (V1 was the successor to X3A12, which had "Word Processing" as its scope, in the days when word processing was done on proprietary dedicated hardware, back around 1980.) The core of ODA was a Ph.D. dissertation by Wolfgang Horak, at the University of Munich. The standard that emerged, however, never really established what an "office document" was. Maybe it was just something that could be produced on a word processor (as a researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, I saw some mighty strange things being produced off those beasties). It grew to be a "compound document", that is something that also might include graphics. When X3J6 merged with X3V1, SGML became part of the work of the combined committee. Because SGML was already being used in industrial-documentation environments with very complex documents, the ODA proponents started a game of catch-up. "Office document" came to be taken as an admission of limitations. By the early 1990s, SGML was gaining ever wider acceptance through the development of CALS and other applications, leading up to HTML and the Web. The ODA team desperately kept adding to their standard, and they changed the "O" to "Open". Neither name changes nor accumulating bulk saved ODA. It tried to encompass everything and wound up being unimplemented. In 1998, the whole project was scrapped in JTC1, and what had been the SGML group, SC18/WG8 became SC34. V1 mirrored the actions in JTC1. Coming back to Patrick's comment, I, too, find both "Open" and "Office" inappropriate for the current proposal, without commenting further on relationships between the proposal and any commercial products, past or present. It's another standard, but I have the same opinion relative to ISO/IEC 26300. If the name was chosen in response to that other standard, then I find it doubly troubling. I second Patrick's suggestion that a new name be found. Jim Mason