New and Emerging Specs & Standards (December 2023)

ISO/IEC 18630:2023 Information technology — Digitally recorded media for information interchange and storage — Quality discrimination method for optical disks and operating method of storage systems for long-term data preservation
Technical Committee: ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 23  Digitally recorded media for information interchange and storage
“This document specifies a quality discrimination method for optical disks and the operating method of storage systems for long-term digital data preservation using optical disks and optical disk drives (hereinafter referred to as "drives"). It is applicable to recordable (write-once) optical disks which can prevent physical overwriting and deletion by erroneous or intentional operation in contexts where greater importance is given to evidence. It is also applicable to read-only (ROM) optical disks. This document specifies: combinations of recordable optical disks and drives used for long-term data preservation; quality discrimination criteria for recordable optical disks and the operation method of long-term storage systems; a quality test for read-only optical disks and the operation method of long-term storage systems; quality discrimination criteria for BD recordable disks when adopting defect management.”

ISO 639:2023 Code for individual languages and language groups
Technical Committee: ISO/TC 37/SC 2 Terminology workflow and language coding
“This document specifies the ISO 639 language code and establishes the harmonized terminology and general principles of language coding. It provides rules for the selection, formation, presentation and use of language identifiers as well as language reference names. It also gives provisions (i.e. principles, rules and guidelines) for the selection, formation and presentation of language names in English and French. Furthermore, it introduces provisions for the adoption of standardized language code elements using language names other than English or French. In addition, this document gives guidance on the use of language identifiers and describes their possible combination with identifiers of other codes. Specifically excluded from the ISO 639 language code are reconstructed languages or formal languages, such as computer programming languages and markup languages. The ISO 639 language code is maintained by the ISO 639 Maintenance Agency (ISO 639/MA).”

Invitation to comment on DocBook Schema V5.2 before call for consent as OASIS Standard – ends January 18th [OASIS]
OASIS and the DocBook TC are pleased to announce that The DocBook Schema Version 5.2 is now available for public review and comment. DocBook is a schema (available in languages including RELAX NG, SGML and XML DTDs, and W3C XML Schema) that is particularly well suited to books and papers about computer hardware and software. Because it is a large and robust schema, 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 schema. Dozens of organizations are using DocBook for millions of pages of documentation, in various print and online formats, worldwide. The TC received four Statements of Use from from Norm Tovey-Walsh, XML Press, the SUSE documentation team, and Jira Kosek.”

W3C updates its 2023 Process Document
“W3C has approved the updated 2023 Process Document, which takes effect [on November 3]. The only change is expanding the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) from 6 elected and 3 appointed participants to 8 elected and 3 appointed participants. The TAG consists of: Tim Berners-Lee who is a life member; 3 participants appointed by the W3C Team; 8 participants elected by the W3C Advisory Committee following the AB/TAG nomination and election process. You can read the Disposition of Comments for rationale or peruse the diff from the previous version. W3C Process Document is developed by the Advisory Board’s Process Task Force working within the W3C Process Community Group. Comments and feedback on the Process Document may be sent as issues in the public GitHub Repository.”