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New and Emerging Specs & Standards (October 2023)

New and Emerging Specs & Standards (October 2023)

October 2023

ISO/IEC TS 5928:2023 Information technology — Cloud computing and distributed platforms — Taxonomy for digital platforms
Technical Committee: ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 38 Cloud computing and distributed platforms
“This document specifies a taxonomy related to digital platforms, by providing definitions and supporting information that disambiguates different uses of the term platform as it applies to digital services (such as cloud computing and other distributed computing systems). […] “Technologies such as cloud computing are supporting the evolution of digital business and accelerating the shift to living and working (in part) online, in ways that would have been impossible a few years ago. […] Terms with alternative meanings in economic, societal, political, regulatory and technical contexts are being labelled with the same or similar names.
Adding clarity on concepts and definitions can assist in the formulation of well-informed policies in important areas such as security, privacy and governance. One of the terms that has been at the forefront of these changes is “platform”. Note that the economic, societal, political, regulatory and technical uses of the word “platform” predate cloud computing by many years.
[…] In a situation where two or more distinct interpretations of the word “platform” are relevant, but only one is taken into account, or where collaborators used two distinct interpretations at cross-purposes, confusion can arise. Therefore, it is important to understand the difference between the technical, economic and general uses of the word platform in the context of digital services. The audience for this document is technologists, economists, policy makers, social scientists and others who wish to precisely and unambiguously use these terms (e.g. in multi-disciplinary conversations).”

Source Code Handling: Preventing Spoofing at the Source [Unicode]
“The Unicode Consortium is providing a new resource to help programming tooling developers, programming language developers, and programming language users to deal with Unicode spoofing. Encompassing letters and symbols (over 149,000 in Unicode 15.1) across the world’s writing systems, it was inevitable that many of them would look similar — and sometimes identical. And of course, there are those who would take advantage of that to swindle. An example of this is “pаypal.com”, where the first ‘а’ is actually a Cyrillic character that is confusable with the Latin alphabet ‘a’. In 2004, the Unicode Consortium began working to address this issue, focusing on URLs and other identifiers that could be spoofed, and produced a specification and technical report with best practices for detecting such cases. Implementations using those specifications have been widely deployed in operating systems.”

Updated W3C Recommendation: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 [W3C]
“The Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AG WG) updated Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1. WCAG and supporting documents explain how to make content more accessible to people with disabilities. The update incorporates existing errata and adds informative notes to success criteria 4.1.1 Parsing. To learn more about WCAG and these updates, see WCAG 2 Overview and WCAG 2 FAQ.”