XML Unlikely to Become an ISO Standard

Recently there have been questions about the likelihood that XML will become an ISO standard.  These questions come from ISO standards that wish to reference XML, but cannot because it is not an ISO standard.  What to do?  What to do?

First it is important to understand that currently there are no plans to make XML an ISO standard.  This is because XML can already be declared using standard mechanisms within ISO 8879 as corrected in 1998.  It also appears that the ISO JTC1 SC34 (ISO's SGML committee) actually has a strong desire to let XML development remain within W3C.  In many ways W3C's XML activities may be viewed as the major mechanism to gather user-requirements for future revisions to ISO 8879.  It is far wiser to maintain this sort of relationship rather than having organizations attempting to create rival specifications.

To require the use of XML in any circumstances where an ISO standard is required, you could use a paragraph  that states the requirement to conform to "ISO International Standard IS 8879:1986 as corrected by Annex J and K and any corrigenda."  You can then use the SGML Declaration from James Clark's "Comparison of SGML and XML" posted at http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-sgml-xml.  

In addition you may need to define special constraints that apply to XML and not to SGML:
* specify the allowed encodings 
* specify whether the document must be Unicode;
* specify whether documents must be standalone;
* specify whether a DOCTYPE declaration must be provided;
* specify whether documents must be valid (for XML they may not have to be valid, just well formed).