What Ken North originally asked is if taking XML to

the standards ecology is a good idea to enable contract-based

work which requires citing a standard from a credible standards

organization is a good idea.   It is. 

 

Len,

 

I think the rationale for an ISO/IEC standard includes government contract rules, participation in other activities, and acceptance by the IT/ISV community.

 

HIPAA is about healthcare transactions, but we'll see other e-commerce scenarios that involve governments that will mandate standards. There will also be domain-specific DTDs and schemas that are advanced to ISO as part of other standards. Jonathan Borden explained a recent example in this Dr. Dobb's thread:

http://www.ddj.com/forums/xml/index.cgi?read=52

 

One of the big interests in XML is as an enabling technology for global e-commerce. The World Trade Organization already has an alliance with ISO and promotes ISO standards for trading purposes.

http://www.iso.ch/wtotbt/wtotbt.htm

 

There's also the question of acceptance by ISVs and IT organizations. I still get comments such as "Is XML something we should be looking at? We use SQL because it's a standard, but we wonder whether XML is ready for prime time."