Re: standards process

[Norman Walsh <Norman.Walsh@east.sun.com>]

/ "Karl Best" <karl.best@oasis-open.org> was heard to say:
| Appended below is the official process for making a committee spec into an
| OASIS standard. Wherever is says to send something to OASIS or that OASIS
| will do something, that's me. So you should send me items a-f below, which
| is a bit more than what I just said on the phone, but most of which can
| still be pointers to web pages.
[...]

Ok, here's a first stab. Let me know what you think.

|       a. A formal specification that is a valid member of its
|          type.

The doctypes at http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/ and
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/sgml/4.1/ are valid XML and
SGML document types.

|       b. Appropriate documentation for the specification.

DocBook 3.1 fully documented by DocBook: The Definitive Guide at
http://docbook.org/tdg/. The changes introduced in DocBook 4 have not
(yet) been integrated into TDG, but they are available at
http://docbook.org/tdg/40updates/

|       c. A clear English-language summary of the specification.

DocBook is a DTD maintained by the DocBook Technical Committee of
OASIS. It is particularly well suited to books and papers about
computer hardware and software (though it is by no means limited to
these applications).

Because it is a large and robust DTD, and because its main structures
correspond to the general notion of what constitutes a "book," DocBook
has been adopted by a large and growing community of authors writing
books of all kinds. DocBook is supported "out of the box" by a number
of commercial tools, and there is rapidly expanding support for it in
a number of free software environments. These features have combined
to make DocBook a generally easy to understand, widely useful, and
very popular DTD. Dozens of organizations are using DocBook for
millions of pages of documentation, in various print and online
formats, worldwide.

|       d. Certification by at least three OASIS member
|          organizations that they are successfully using the
|          specification.

What constitutes certification?

|       e. An account of or pointer to votes and comments received
|          in any earlier attempts to standardize substantially the
|          same specification, together with the originating TC's
|          response to each comment.

This is the first time we're going through this process, so I'm not
sure that there's anything to point to. The meeting minutes and public
discussion on the docbook-tc and docbook mailing lists would be
informative, I suppose.

|       f. A pointer to the publicly visible comments archive for
|          the originating TC.

http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook/

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman.Walsh@East.Sun.COM | A man may by custom fortify himself against
XML Technology Center     | pain, shame, and suchlike accidents; but as
Sun Microsystems, Inc.    | to death, we can experience it but once,
                          | and are all apprentices when we come to
                          | it.--Montaigne