Bulguksa Entrance

Last week I attended meetings of SC 34 and its working groups in Busan. Here’s an update on what is going on in the International Standard document format scene …

(For reference, the meeting resolutions are here [PDF]).

DSDL

The multi-part DSDL Standard has reached a type of completion as all the active parts of the project now have (or will very shortly have) published Standards. Since our last meeting we have seen the publication of Part 5 (Extensible Datatypes), and the unanimous approval of Part 11 (Schema Association, also published as a W3C Note).

ISO “ZIP”

After several months of rather political wrangling the work is now underway to develop an ISO “ZIP” – or, to give the Project its formal title: ISO/IEC 21320-1 Information technology — Document Container File — Part 1: Core. The new Standard will take the form of a shell document which points to the well-established PKWare Inc. .ZIP Application Note. The chief merits of Standardization are that it will make the standard easier to reference from other International Standard (both ODF and OOXML use it, for example), as well as clarifying the IPR regime under which Zip technology can be used. The goal is to retain 100% compatibility with established code and archives out there, but there may also be a need for clarification in some areas – for example in the encoding of non-ASCII file names for items in an archive. Notice that this is Part 1 of a multi-part Standard; the idea is that future additional parts may build functionality on top of the core. Although nothing has even been formally proposed yet for this, some ideas that have been aired are for standardized encyption & signing, and for a URI scheme for addressing into archives.

Two‐and‐a‐half cheers for ODF 1.2

During the week the news broke that ODF 1.2 had been approved as an OASIS standard.

Document format confusion

Impressions of Korea

This is my third visit to Korea

Korea Train eXpress (KTX)