SC 34 WG meetings in Paris next week

Once again I feel that bubbling up of almost schoolboy fervour that presages a set of SC 34 meetings. In Paris no less (AFNOR shall be our hosts): the city of love, fine art and rognons à la moutarde.

What is tasty on SC 34’s menu? Well four working groups are meeting next week:

• WG 1 (which I convene) will be carrying forward its work on foundation standards – particularly the schema languages of DSDL. We have two new (/proposed) projects to discuss: one a schema language focussed on cross-reference validation; one on associating schemas with documents using processing instructions. Probably our most successful schema language, RELAX NG, is due for an update and several new features are up for discussion: keep it coming!
• WG 4 (OOXML) will continue its intensive maintenance on ISO/IEC 29500 – not least in handling a new set of approved corrigenda (just voted on) and dealing with the day-to-day grind of correction and improvement. There are larger questions to answer too, in particular those which concern the relationship between the Strict and Transitional forms of OOXML. I have led the preparation of a background paper on this which (thanks to the newly open WG 4 mail archive) can be accessed as a public document (PDF). I predict some lively discussion!
• WG 5 (OOXML/ODF interop) will continue its work examing how (or not) the two formats may be used by systems which hope to interoperate. TR 29166 - dedicated to this topic - continues to take shape ahead of its projected finishing date in 2011.
• WG 6 is the newly-created WG dedicated to the JTC 1 side of maintenance of ISO/IEC 26300:2006 (aka ODF v1.0). As a newly-created group there will no doubt be a certain amount of adminstrivia to be got through but there are more substantial issues looming too: defect reports to be advanced and the longer-term project of amending ISO/IEC 26300 to bring it into alignment with ODF 1.1 – there is general agreement that it makes sense to reduce marketplace confusion by reducing the confusing number of standard (and non-standard) “ODF” variants out there, and aligning versions between standards organisations.

Stay tuned (and follow hashtag #sc34 for real-time updates) …