ISO
12083; New Revision to Support XML
The
working group for ISO 12083, The Electronic
Manuscript Standard, hosted by GCA, met on
May 1, 1999 in Granada Spain. Dianne Kennedy from
GCA served as convener. This meeting was called
to resolve issues for the next revision of this
ISO standard.
ISO
12083 XML DTD
The
first issue to be resolved was the content of
the revised standard. Until this time, ISO 12083
contained only SGML DTDs. In fact there were DTDs
for Article, Serial, Book, as well as for math
and tables. Over the past two years the working
group studied both the ways the current audience
is using the DTDs as well as requests for changes
and improvements to make this ISO standard more
useful. The working group voted to eliminate the
current SGML DTDs from the specification. These
DTDs will be replaced by an XML DTD that references
both ISO 8879 WebSGML as well as W3C's XML Version
1.0. In addition, a CSS-2 style sheet for the
tag set would be provided. An XSL style sheet
will be provided if XSL becomes a W3C Recommendation
before the end of 1999.
Modular
Approach
Members
of the working group decided to have a much more
modular approach in the next revision of the standard.
Instead of differentiating among book, serial,
and article, a different modularization will be
used. Most "bugs" reported in the tag
set were caused by individual differences from
precise specifications for Book, Article, and
Serial in the current version of ISO 12083. Also
separating metadata into "front" and
"rear" caused problems for some. By
combining "front" and "rear"
into metadata and using transformations to order
the metadata for publishing, interchange compliance
should be more straight forward.
The
new modular breakdown will include:
- Metadata
(front matter/ back matter)
- Body
elements
- Tables
(CALS, HTML, and current ISO 12083 model)
- Math
(MathML, OpenMath, and direct inclusion of TeX)
- Chemical
Formula (CML)
Those
modules that are not part of ISO 12083 will be
included by reference. Decisions for recommended
modules were made based on current usage, authoring
tool availability, and support for viewing in
mainstream browsers with plug-ins.
Other
Updates
It
was decided that graphic formats must be updated
to reflect new graphic standards such as SVG and
WebCGM. The ICAD specification must be checked
to verify compliance with today's accessibility
standards. Likewise the use of HyTime should be
reviewed to be sure that it is compliant with
the latest ISO version.
A
new attribute will be added to references in bibliographies
to allow for digital identifiers such as the DOI
to be used. Other sorts of links will be handled
by the new XLink and XPointer mechanisms being
developed by the W3C.
What's
Next?
Dianne
Kennedy will begin work to incorporate all updates
into a new version of 12083. This document will
be made available on the Web. It will reviewed
at the next meeting of the working group to be
held in conjunction with XML '99 in Philadelphia
in December 1999. 
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