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http://www.iso.org/iso/newsandmedia/pressrelease.h tm?refid=Ref1070

When can the clowns have another go at it?

According to the ISO/IEC press release, the decisive "Ballot Resolution Meeting" (BRM) next Februrary will be in Geneva, Switzerland, where e.g. Ecma is headquartered. How can Ecma be prevented from having a similarly corrupting influence on the "Ballot Resolution Meeting" as they had in the Swiss standardization organization SNV (SIUG appealed)?

The linked article above states the presumed "No" vote to be unofficial and according to unamed "sources". This could well go the other way and in fact be approved. Any celebration should wait until ISO offically releases the voting results.

Like here?

Sesostris III

Press release:
http://www.iso.org/iso/pressrelease.htm?refid=Ref1 070

eknagy

ODF is already an ISO standard. My bad.

http://www.iso.org/iso/en/aboutiso/isomembers/Memb erCountryList.MemberCountryList

How about everyone in /. email the people from your country and get all your friends to warn them about all the technical problems in the proposed standard!

http://www.iso.org/iso/en/aboutiso/isomembers/Memb erCountryList.MemberCountryList/

could this mean the end of BitTorrent

How can anyone take ISO seriously when hardly a single one of the member bodies' web sites validate with W3. Hell, the Greek Member web site even uses some shitty Flash "intro"!

What a disgrace.

(just kidding, and besides, Iraq doesn't seem to currently be a member of JTC1/SC34)

I thought the purpose of a standard was to charge exorbitant prices for access to mind-numbing details of well-known technology. Maybe that's just ISO, though...

I thought the purpose of a standard was to charge exorbitant prices for access to mind-numbing details of well-known technology. Maybe that's just ISO, though...

I thought the purpose of a standard was to charge exorbitant prices for access to mind-numbing details of well-known technology. Maybe that's just ISO, though...

That's why about two dozen companies, businesses, universities and agencies got together about five years ago to hammer out a universal office format. Since then, about five dozen are actively involved in the development and the initial review involved about 600. Last year, this universal office format was accepted and published by the International Organization for Standards as ISO/IEC 26300.

A universal document for hypertext documents (HTML) has proven highly beneficial and profitable, to say the least. It's not hard to imagine similar gains from having a universal document format for office formats.

As I said, the process took five years. M$ was invited to participate early on and could, if its management decided to, still start participating or even using the standard any time. Top engineers in the company have gone on record saying that there are no technical barriers to implementing ISO/IEC 26300 and that it would be rather straight forward to do so. You connect the dots.

The only serious contender against ISO/IEC 26300 has been China's Uniform Office Format. However, the two groups have been working actively to harmonize the specifications.

What part of MPEG4-10 is free? It costs money to even look at the standard to implement http://www.iso.org/iso/en/CatalogueDetailPage.Cata logueDetail?CSNUMBER=43058&ICS1=35&ICS2=40&ICS3=. Then it also costs money in order use http://www.mpegla.com/avc/AVC_TermsSummary.pdf. Not to mention that the mpegla doesn't guarantee that all the patents they license you for are sufficient to implement the standard. It is only open in that you don't have to have a secret handshake to view it.

Also

ISO = International Organization for Standardization

http://www.iso.org/iso/en/ISOOnline.frontpage

I imagine ISO is actually a acronym in a European (French, Scandinavian?) language.

From ISO web site:
http://www.iso.org/iso/en/aboutiso/introduction/in dex.html#three

Because "International Organization for Standardization" would have different abbreviations in different languages ("IOS" in English, "OIN" in French for Organisation internationale de normalisation), it was decided at the outset to use a word derived from the Greek isos, meaning "equal". Therefore, whatever the country, whatever the language, the short form of the organization's name is always ISO.

The name of the organization is: ISO - International Organization for Standardization. I have no idea why it's "ISO" when clearly it should be "IOS".

PGA

OpenDocument is already a ISO standard, ISO 26300. The status is 60.60, which means "International Standard published".

"ISO/IEC 26300:2006 defines an XML schema for office applications and its semantics. The schema is suitable for office documents, including text documents, spreadsheets, charts and graphical documents like drawings or presentations, but is not restricted to these kinds of documents.

ISO/IEC 26300:2006 provides for high-level information suitable for editing documents. It defines suitable XML structures for office documents and is friendly to transformations using XSLT or similar XML-based tools."

http://www.iso.org/iso/en/CatalogueDetailPage.Cata logueDetail?CSNUMBER=43485&scopelist=PROGRAMME

It is wonderful to hear that the PDF specification will be the subject of open standardization. Caution should be exercised when implementing products though. Almost 400 patents have been granted to Adobe. Adobe has another 50 patent applications in process. There may also be additional patents that have been assigned to Adobe or that Adobe has an exclusive license to practice. Adobe may also have intellectual property in foreign markets that are greater in scope than what Adobe has in the United States.

Caution should be exercised because ISO does not require that its standards be patent-free. Necessary patents merely must be available on a reasonable and non-discriminatory basis. Adobe (or anyone else really) may also seek patents on how PDFs are used, manipulated, etc.

This doesn't necessarily mean that Adobe is bad or that any Open Source Software projects will ever face any obstacles from Adobe. It simply means that some care should be taken to determine whether any of Adobe's patents cover features of the PDF standard or its uses, especially when developing software that mimics an existing proprietary product. If there is a question, then OSS developers should contact Adobe to try to get a license (perhaps for the consideration of a promise that the resulting product remain open source).

Why is this still being called Oasis OpenDocument? Have you already forgotten that it's an ISO standard?

ODF spec page count: 722.

OpenXML spec page count: 6000 !!

use the now industry-standard Microsoft format,

What was the ISO-number of that standard again? Oh wait, it doesn't have one. Unlike some others.

Which format did you say was industry standard?

From the ISO website's FAQ:

1.4 What does "international standardization" mean? When the large majority of products or services in a particular business or industry sector conform to International Standards, a state of industry-wide standardization can be said to exist. This is achieved through consensus agreements between national delegations representing all the economic stakeholders concerned - suppliers, users and, often, governments. They agree on specifications and criteria to be applied consistently in the classification of materials, the manufacture of products and the provision of services. In this way, International Standards provide a reference framework, or a common technological language, between suppliers and their customers - which facilitates trade and the transfer of technology.

1.5 What benefits does international standardization bring to businesses? For businesses, the widespread adoption of International Standards means that suppliers can base the development of their products and services on reference documents which have broad market relevance. This, in turn, means that they are increasingly free to compete on many more markets around the world.

1.6 What benefits does international standardization bring to customers? For customers, the worldwide compatibility of technology which is achieved when products and services are based on International Standards brings them an increasingly wide choice of offers, and they also benefit from the effects of competition among suppliers.

http://www.iso.org/iso/en/faqs/faq-general.html

"Give me ISO 8601 or give me death!"

I'm afraid not.

Sun's Java specifications are available only under restrictive licenses

No, they are freely downloadable from java.sun.com (unlike, say, the ISO-9899 C standard which ISO charge 340 Swiss Francs for). The license states that any independent implementation cannot make proprietary extensions/subtractions and needs to pass a test. How is that a bad thing? Do you enjoy that the multitude of SQL implementations do most small things in their own different way?

Other specifications are provided by the JCP where Sun is one member of many - but with extra powers.

Anyway: Some of us are satisfied with Sun's free-as-in-beer implemenation, as are most other developers, which is reflected in the slow progress of the OSS implementations (since OSS developers generally make software for their own use).

IKVM, Kaffe, Classpath, and others have been laboriously reverse engineered from third party sources, and Sun has to this day refused to help in their creation.

"Kaffe is a clean room implementation of the Java virtual machine, plus the associated class libraries needed to provide a Java runtime environment." - clean room does not necessarily mean reverse engineered. Anyway, Kaffe now has merged in parts of GNU Classpath, so perhaps the NIH-istic multitude of implementations could merge into one so that an OSS project actually got somewhere? It's not like GCC depended on AT&T to make progress.

This Kaffe project slideshow is a very interesting read.

For years now, OpenOffice.org users have had smaller documents both in OpenOffice.org 1.0 Format and OpenDocument format (ODF), both of which are based on XML and ZIP. Now, OpenDocument is an ISO standard. Also, many other applications already also support OpenDocument.

Since Microsoft was a member of OASIS when OpenDocument when the format was standardized, people have questioned why Microsoft created its own, different format instead of adopting also OpenDocument. In any case, now Microsoft sort of supports a third-party ODF plugin.

Many of the factories in Taiwan & China ... have ISO 9001 certifications

It has been.

You need to get hold of a copy of John Seddon's book "In Pursuit of Quality: Case Against ISO 9000". If you're stuck with a mandate to comply then at least it should help you avoid the most common pitfalls. There's an article at http://www.iso.org/iso/en/iso9000-14000/addresourc es/articles/pdf/viewpoint_4-98.pdf where he summarises his position.

The price for ISO 9660:1998 (in PDF or dead tree) is currently 120 CHF, or about 97 USD. Without reading that spec, all you can do is run software written by people who have read it. You can't even correctly maintain that software; you can't be anything more than an end user limited to what someone else decided you ought to be allowed to do.

As far as I know ISO only has standard organisations as members, which represent a country (ANSI for the United States). As I remember Microsoft took place in a workgroup, which only makes minor edits (IANASG). See http://www.iso.org/iso/en/aboutiso/isomembers/Memb erCountryList.MemberCountryList

HTML is arguably not open. Since HTML is an SGML application, you need to know SGML's parsing rules in order to parse it properly. SGML is the ISO 8879:1986 standard that costs ~140 EUR / 170 USD / 100 GBP to read.

You can decide not to pay for the standard and wing it instead, which is what browser developers have typically done, and which is why practically none of them can parse HTML correctly.

In my opinion, if you have to pay to read a standard in order to process documents correctly, then you can't really class those documents as using an open standard.

Of course not! India has always been using the dd/mm/yyyy format, and 4/1 means 4th of January.

It is true that in China, 4/1 means 1th of April, but that's because they use the yyyy-mm-dd format, which is a logical order (most significant–least significant), unlike your American mm-dd-yyyy order which makes no sense.

The ISO standard (ISO 8601) is to use yyyy-mm-dd (as you see in dates on Slashdot and all websites that actually realise it's the World Wide Web).

To prevent ambiguity, it is best to spell out the name of the month in full, when you are not specifying the year, and there is no way of telling whether month/date or date/month is being used.

This is what the International Standards Organisation is for.

http://www.iso.org/

No standard way to get all tables in a database.

There is a common language for stored procedures / triggers. SQL Persistent Stored Modules (SQL/PSM) is defined in ISO/IEC 9075-4:2003 and is currently implemented by at least IBM DB2, MySQL 5 and Mimer SQL. An implementation effort for PostgreSQL / EnterpriseDB is under way.

If your database does not support SQL/PSM and is not working on implementing it you have only your choice of database to blame for that.

...is the day when ISO 8879 can be downloaded for free. Granted, OpenSP kicks ass at much of it, but I'd still like to read the standard without paying ~$224, and if Goldfarb is the one in the way of that, he's gonna get smacked soon.

(Or did I miss a PDF somewhere this side of eMule? I've seen none there of 8879 yet...)

Or if you want someone (arguably) more trusted: ISO (almost at the end of the page).

Google is probably adhering to ISO 3166 as found here:

http://www.iso.org/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma /10faq/frequently-asked-questions.html#QS03

03: Why is Taiwan named Taiwan Province of China in ISO 3166-1?
A: The names in ISO 3166-1 - and thus on our Webpage - are taken from United Nations sources. These sources are authoritative inputs to the international country code standard. They are:

* The United Nations Bulletin Country Names and the
* Country and Region Codes for Statistical Use of the United Nations Statistics Division

Since Taiwan is not a UN member it does not figure in the UN bulletin on country names. The printed edition of the publication Country and region codes for statistical use gives the name we use in ISO 3166-1. By adhering to UN sources the ISO 3166/MA stays politically neutral.

Yes, for example Whirlpool (http://www.iso.org/iso/en/CatalogueDetailPage.Cat alogueDetail?CSNUMBER=39876&scopelist=)

I wonder who those guys called ISO are, that they endorse the MPEG-4 audio spec that includes AAC? Maybe a stardards body?

so what IS the correct way to render that? It's not valid HTML

Actually, it is. My whole point revolves around that fact. You only think that it's invalid because no browser you've ever used understands it.

is there a documented standard saying what the correct behavior is? Where exactly?

The ISO 8879:1986 standard, also known as SGML. HTML is an SGML application, and because it uses SHORTTAG NET, this particular shortcut is available to HTML documents. It also happens to be the reason why, even though the W3C really don't want it to be the case, no form of XHTML is fully backwards compatible with HTML.

Unfortunately, I can't link to the standard to prove it, because you have to pay to obtain a copy of it. In this case, it costs 224 Swiss Francs, which is about 180 US dollars. That's another dirty little secret the W3C doesn't like to publicise - their "open" HTML "standard" (fact three: it's not a standard, just a specification - ISO have published ISO-HTML, but there are significant differences between that and the W3C's specifications) requires you to pay to read a standard if you want to implement it properly.

I think my guess would be

Last time I checked, browser results varied. A conformant HTML user-agent would understand "<b/test/." to mean exactly the same thing as "<b>test</b>.".

Maybe you want to know

When from Where did What by Whom

When = ISO 8601 Timestamp (from)
Where = IP Adress / Name of computer...
Who = which Login /registered user did
What requested file foo/bar?a=213b=dfg

I thought I was missing something new here, but TFA is wrong ... ISO 9669 is a standard for the interface for tank containers. ISO 9660 is the volume and file system standard.

I thought I was missing something new here, but TFA is wrong ... ISO 9669 is a standard for the interface for tank containers. ISO 9660 is the volume and file system standard.

first day then month and then year (like numbers smallest first then bigger)..

You've thrown the fish in reverse, and now it's bass-ackwards. The International Organization for Standardization maintains that the year comes first, then the month, then the day.

It isn't just an ECMA standard, it is an ISO standard as well ... It would do more harm than good for MS to be agressive towards any OSS implimentation, beyond this, with MS being aware of said development for several years, hasn't enforced it's IP/Patents, and would have that much weaker of a case.

Beyond this, it is *MORE* likely that the MS implimentation tramples on other patents, and there is prior art for pretty much anything in .Net

The catch is that C# and CLR are not open standards - they are just ECMA standards.