Subject: Description of changes

From: Steve Carson <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Aug 1997 12:19:45 -0600

This forwarded mail contains a description of the changes in Draft 4 of the
Cooperative Agreement from the Kista Version.

>Date: Tue, 12 Aug 1997 13:20:12 +0200 (MET)
>From: Chris Lilley <[email-masked]>
>To: Steve Carson <[email-masked]>, [email-masked]
>Subject: (Fwd) Re: Cooperative Agreement
>
>
>--- Forwarded mail from Chris Lilley <[email-masked]>
>
>Date: Wed, 23 Jul 1997 19:47:09 +0200 (MET)
>From: Chris Lilley <[email-masked]>
>To: Steve Carson <[email-masked]>, [email-masked], [email-masked]
>Subject: Re: Cooperative Agreement
>Cc: [email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked],
>        [email-masked]
>
>On Jul 21,  6:51pm, Steve Carson wrote:
>
>> I am contacting you again as Chair of ISO/IEC JTC1/SC24. SC 24 is ready to
>> forward a New Work Item Proposal to JTC 1 for approval to initiate the PNG
>> project. Before we do this we need at least a statement of intent from W3C
>> that you will work with us to transpose PNG into an ISO standard and will
>> negotiate and approve a Cooperative Agreement that governs the work, to be
>> based on the draft we gave you in June.
>
>The issue has now been dicussed by both the Advisory Council of W3C
>(representatives from all the member companies) and by W3C management.
>I believe that we now have agreement in principle to proceed, and
>commitment from W3C management to negotiate and approve a Cooperative
>Agreement based on the June draft.
>
>> I understand from Chris Lilley that approval of this draft agreement is in
>> the works, but recent attempts to contact Chris to determine the current
>> status have failed, I assume because he is out of the office.
>
>A mixture of being out, busy and also I was ill recently; my apologies for
>keeping you waiting. The current status is that the Cooperative Agreement
>has been discussed in detail by W3C management and myself; some changes
>were proposed and these are incorporated into the attached version.
>The decision was to proceed with the proposed cooperation, which was seen
>as being valuable.
>
>Some changes were minor clarifications: ISO will not be changing the W3C
>Recommendations, as the text seemed to indicate - rather it will be
>changing it's CD and DIS texts relative to the base W3C Recommendations
>(I believe that was the intent of the wording but the old wording could
>be and was misinterpreted).
>
>The part about basing ISO work on W3C Recommendations was moved to make
>it a little more prominent. Sections 5.4 and 5.5 were swapped over to
>correspond to the chronological order (changes, then finishing up rather
>than finishing up followed by changes). The list in the (old)5.5 (new)5.4
>was altered from three list items to two list items and a comment, since
>it could have been be mis-interpreted .
>
>Text about W3C process has had some detail added, a change which mainly
>makes clearer to our membership what will happen.
>
>There was agreement about the overall two-part working process; the
>technical part happens in W3C with ISO participation, and the
>final editorial part happens in ISO with W3C participation. The process
>ends with a ratifying vote.
>
>The June draft of the Cooperative Agreement gave some protection to ISO
>in the event (considered unlikely) that there were severe technical
>flaws in a W3C Recommendation which would render it unimplementable or
>otherwise significantly flawed. The position of W3C management is that
>there should be a similar protection for W3C in the event (considered
>unlikely) that there were severe technical flaws, or differences of
>interpretation introduced by ISO editorial process, which could lead to
>inconsistent implementation. In accordance with the June draft, "The
>ISO/IEC DIS text shall be published by the W3C  for review within the
>Consortium according to Consortium practices". (The new draft goes into
>a little W3C-specific detail about how that review should be conducted).
>
>The addition to the finishing up process was made at the behest of Tim
>Berners-Lee and appears to meet the requirement of W3C management that
>W3C have some protection against the ISO document turning out to compromise
>rather than enhance the interoperability of the Web. The proposal is that,
>should either the DIS ballot or the W3C AC ballot fail, the document
>should not be promoted to ISO/IEC IS status.
>
>Since the same AC has already voted in favour of the original technical
>content (when it promoted the document from Proposed Recommendation to
>Recommendation) the only circumstance in which it would vote no would
>be if substantial changes had been introduced by the ISO process which
>were felt to hinder interoperability. This is of course unlikely, since
>such changes should have been caught and dealt with by the document
>editors; similarly it is unlikely that technical changes would be required
>since the document authors, editors and the implementors should have caught
>them. Clearly, however, both parties require some protection for the
>exceptional circumstance.
>
>> If I can just
>> get e-mail from a W3C officer stating your intent as described above, we
>> can go ahead and start the project.
>
>I have e-mail from Jean-François Abramatic, Chairman of the W3C
>which he has authorised me to forward to you stating that intent, based
>on the new draft of the Cooperative Agreement. He will follow up with
>official notification on paper, if required. We hope that the process
>will take less than "several months" in practice.
>
>--- Forwarded mail from Jean-Francois Abramatic <[email-masked]>
>Letter of Intent
>
>This letter of intent confirms that the signers intend to negotiate
>a Cooperative Agreement based on the attached initial draft dated
>July 21, 1997. This agreement will cover cooperation between the World
>Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and ISO/IEC JTC1 to develop an ISO standard:
>Portable Networked Graphics (PNG) based on the W3C publically available
>PNG Recommendation.
>
>Once this letter is signed by all parties, the Chair of ISO/IEC JTC1/SC24
>will initiate processing of the proposed Cooperative agreement through
>the approval steps required by ISO and the IEC and the Chairman of W3C
>will initiate processing of the proposed Cooperative agreement through
>the approval steps required by W3C.
>
>This process is expected to take several months, and both W3C and SC24
>agree to make a good faith effort to mutually resolve any concerns with
>the draft text.
>
>For ISO and IEC
>
>George S. Carson, Chair, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC24, Computer Graphics and Image
>Processing
>
>For W3C
>
>Jean-Francois Abramatic, Chairman
>
>---End of forwarded mail from Jean-Francois Abramatic <[email-masked]>
>
>--
>Chris Lilley, W3C                          [ http://www.w3.org/ ]
>Graphics and Fonts Guy            The World Wide Web Consortium
>http://www.w3.org/people/chris/              INRIA,  Projet W3C
>[email-masked]                       2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
>+33 (0)4 93 65 79 87       06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France
>
>
>---End of forwarded mail from Chris Lilley <[email-masked]>
>
>-- 
>Chris Lilley, W3C                          [ http://www.w3.org/ ]
>Graphics and Fonts Guy            The World Wide Web Consortium
>http://www.w3.org/people/chris/              INRIA,  Projet W3C
>[email-masked]                       2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
>+33 (0)4 93 65 79 87       06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France
>
>

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Steve Carson                 phone:   +1-505-521-7399
GSC Associates Inc.          fax:     +1-505-521-9321
5272 Redman Road             e-mail:  [email-masked]
Las Cruces, NM 88011 USA
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