Thread Subject: Re: Definitions

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From: Sean Hayes
Date: Mon, Jun 04 2007 6:25 AM

I don't think that its necessarily a problem to indicate specific product names as examples in a definition, and the open/closed, patent or royalty status has no bearing on whether a technology is a classed as a content format or not.

However to avoid any "I want my product mentioned too" arguments, and also to avoid unnecessarily dating the standard, I agree that avoiding or severely limiting their use is a good idea.

Sean Hayes
Standards and Policy Team
Corporate Accessibility Group
Microsoft
Phone:
mob +44 7977 455002
office +44 117 9719730


-----Original Message-----
From: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = [mailto: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = ] On Behalf Of Peter Korn
Sent: 01 June 2007 23:32
To: TEITAC Web/Software Subcommittee
Subject: Re: [teitac-websoftware] Definitions

Hi Andi,

We have tried to stay away from mentioning specific corporate product
names in our standards, even just when enumerating examples.

In the content definition page below, you enumerate a set of content
format examples. HTML and SMIL are industry standards that come from
the W3C - they are further open and royalty-free and patent-free
standards. JPEG, while extremely common, is not royalty and patent free
(compare this to PNG and SVG for images). PDF is commonly associated
with one vendor (Adobe), though specific variants have achieved a level
of standardization (e.g. PDF/A) and a royalty and patent free level.

Do all of these pass our "don't reference corporate products" test?

I would also suggest ODF and Ogg as royalty and patent free standard
content formats. If we accept the unqualified PDF and we accept JPEG,
then we should also consider MPEG and Quicktime and RealMedia for video
(especially since we don't otherwise have a video format, besides Ogg
Theora).


Regards,

Peter Korn
Accessibility Architect,
Sun Microsystems, Inc.

> I started a page of definitions. [1]
>
> We had developed one already for "programmatically determinable" and we had
> initial drafts for "content" and "content format". Several more were
> suggested at last week's TEITAC meeting so I took a stab at drafting
> something for them.
>
> Please review and comment for discussion at next week's meeting. If you
> suggest additional terms we need to define, please submit a proposed
> definition.
>
> [1] http://teitac.org/wiki/Web_and_Software:_Definitions
>
> Andi
>
>

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