CSA Preface
Standards development within the Information Technology sector is harmonized with international standards development. Through the CSA Technical Committee on Information Technology (TCIT), Canadians serve as the Canadian Advisory Committee (CAC) on ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 on Information Technology (ISO/IEC JTC1) for the Standards Council of Canada (SCC), the ISO member body for Canada and sponsor of the Canadian National Committee of the IEC. Also, as a member of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Canada participates in the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (ITU-T).
At the time of publication, ISO/IEC 24754:2008 is available from ISO and IEC in English only. CSA will publish the French version when it becomes available from ISO and IEC.
This Standard has been developed in compliance with Standards Council of Canada requirements for National Standards of Canada. It has been published as a National Standard of Canada by CSA Group.
Scope
When a structured document is interchanged between an originator and a recipient, the recipient refers to the style specifications that the originator provides to reconstruct the presentation. However, when the recipient does not have sufficient rendering functionality, it may fail to reconstruct the presentation output as the originator expected. In order to preserve presentation output in the course of interchange, the originator and recipient need to negotiate over functionalities referring to the specifications of document rendering systems. To satisfy this requirement, this standard provides the minimum requirements for specifying document rendering systems. The document specification format shall have the same minimum requirements described here.
This International Standard can apply to the document processing environment, where a document is given in a logically structured format which is expressed by a structure markup language, and the visual representation of the document is described by means of the external style and layout specifications which a style and layout specifications language provides. The visual representation of the given document is generated when the style and layout specifications are applied to the logical structure by a document rendering system.
This International Standard provides an abstract list of the features that a rendering system for an authored document may have. The list provides a frame of reference, against which the user and implementor can compare the features of document rendering systems. However, this International Standard does not specify a concrete interchange syntax or direct how each document rendering system shall behave.
This International Standard provides the minimum requirements to specify the features that a document rendering system which transforms formatting objects to rendering output. It may be used as a frame of reference, against which the user, implementer, or software agent may compare the features of a document rendering system. According to these requirements, the user may express what he or she expects of a document rendering system, the implementer may describe the functionality and capability of the document rendering system that he or she implements, and the software agent may negotiate a minimum set of functionality and capability that are shared across different document rendering system implementations.