From masonjd@y12.doe.gov Tue May 29 08:19:40 2007
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Date: Tue, 29 May 2007 11:16:41 -0400
From: "Mason, James David (MXM)" <masonjd@y12.doe.gov>
Subject: RE: Rob Weir's Comments: Page 01, Comment 02-07,
 "Electronc Annexes in a humanly readable, lined-numbered format"
In-reply-to: <465B16AD.8090506@durusau.net>
To: patrick@durusau.net, robert_weir@us.ibm.com
Cc: Rex Jaeschke <rex@RexJaeschke.com>, Dave Welsh <dave.welsh@microsoft.com>,
        Doug Mahugh <Doug.Mahugh@microsoft.com>,
        Frank Farance <frank@farance.com>, Jerry Smith <jerry.smith@disa.mil>,
        Jon Bosak <jon.bosak@sun.com>, Kevin Trainor <ktrainor@ligent.net>,
        "Levine, Leonard F CIV DISA GES-E" <Leonard.Levine@disa.mil>,
        "Lynne A. Price" <lprice@txstruct.com>, Norm Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>,
        Richard Barber <Richard.Barber@mindjet.com>,
        Steve Carton <steve.carton@retrievalsystems.com>,
        Tim Schoechle <timothy@schoechle.org>
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 "Electronc Annexes in a humanly readable, lined-numbered format"
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 FILETIME=[5E0010E0:01C7A204]

The final form of the document, so far as electronic release is
involved, is something that can be negotiated.

For a starter, when SC34 sends the final thing up to JTC1, we can
request that it be made freely available online. We have two
justifications for this: (1) it's a document that originated outside
JTC1 and was made available on the originator's site, so the usual ISO
restrictions about access don't apply and (2) there are content portions
(e.g., the schemas) that need to be accessible to implementors. (These
are the same things that were said about ODF, coming as it did from
OASIS.)

For what the online version might look like, I draw your attention to
WG8 N1920Rev
(http://www1.y12.doe.gov/capabilities/sgml/wg8/document/1920.htm), which
was prepared for the publication of ISO/IEC 10744:1997, HyTime. ISO may
want to produce paper (or a paper analog like PDF), but that doesn't
mean that such has to be the only form of publication. WG8 offered
HyTime in all sorts of formats, ranging from the source SGML that was
used to publish the document to an elaborate HTML rendering. Our postion
was that HyTime as a paper document was pretty much unreadable (and it
was only 500 pages!), so making the SGML avalable would allow others to
manipulate it to discover what they needed to. Although ISO considered
the paper the normative text, WG8 made it pretty much clear that the
considered the HTML the only useful form of the document. (This
publication antedated the development of Topic Maps, or we probably
would have put the thing up as a TM.)

The point is that since the document in question comes from outside ISO,
the originators have the freedom to create an online version that is
more useful to both reviewers and potential implementors than the
paper-like thing that is envisioned by the Directives. I would strongly
encourage them to do so for the whole document and not just the annexes.

Jim Mason
(Still the) Chairman, SC34 


