Standards

SSP's Standards Watch has a mission to be your guide and resource to all standards relevant to print and electronic publishing. Wish us luck.

We have placed this resource on the SSP Web site as a convenience to the scholarly publishing community. We hope you find the links within this section useful and informative. Please use the navigation links at left to view the category of your choice.

Standards. How can such a simple concept mean so many different things to different people? Maybe it's because there are so many standards for standards. These pages will help you keep track of what's important, which standards are emerging, and what is honored more in the breach than by the book.

There are several kinds of standards. The highest level of standard is public and maintained by a certifying organization. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) are examples of these organizations.

By clicking any of the links in the navigation area at the upper left corner of this page, you can view emerging standards that have been certified by organizations. Of great relevance to online publishing, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) maintains not only closed standards but evolving standards and ideas in search of standards.

Next in the pecking order are standards that are agreed upon by a number of manufacturers. Usually a group of industry leaders (or competitors of a single industry leader) get together and create a specification to which each of them will adhere more or less. The Open E-Book Standard is an example of this type of standard.

Then there are the "800-pound gorilla" standards. Here, a single company creates a product, promotes it, and then, by publishing a specification for the product, makes it possible for others to offer a greater or lesser degree of support for the product.

Sometimes these standards are so good that they are adopted by a standards-certifying organization. Often they are quite useful. Other times they're not much more than a grab for market share.

Some notable standards of the 800-pound gorilla type are: JAVA Language Specification (Sun Microsystems), JavaScript (standardized as ECMAscript, diluted by Jscript) (Netscape, Inc), and Portable Document Specification (Adobe).

As always, we are particularly interested in standards that support structured information and search, including the semantic web, controlled vocabularies, and tools for standards that offer positive advantages in cross-media publishing.

Section Editor: David Stabb