ISO/IEC JTC1/SC18/WG8, having read JTC 1 N 4054 (SC 18 N 5328), makes the following observations:

• Except for "Plain DOS Text file, in code table 850 (Latin-1), with character set limited to the characters of ISO/IEC 8859-1," all the file formats listed are proprietary products and make no reference to ISO/IEC standards.
• There is an application of a JTC1 standard (SGML, ISO 8879:1986) which is capable of representing many of the kinds of documents (e.g., discussion papers, document registers, meeting notices) processed by JTC1 committees: HTML.
• This application is supported by numerous products including editors, conversion tools, and viewers, many of which are available free or at nominal cost (certainly less than the cost of the products listed in JTC 1 N 4054).
• HTML is in use by millions of people on the World-Wide Web (WWW), requires little training, and is adequate for presentation of many kinds of documents.
• HTML is already in use in the ISO/IEC environment:
  • ISO-CS has a WWW server
  • JTC1/SC18 has recently established a WWW presence
  • JTC1/SC18/WG8 has had a WWW site for over a year and has had notable success using it as the primary means of distribution for its documents (many WG8 members also maintain WWW sites).

WG8, accordingly, recommends to JTC1 that it adopt the HTML application of SGML as its recommended means of distribution of electronic documents.

Note:

In recommending HTML for the means of presentation of documents in electronic form, WG8 is not recommending that the HTML application be the primary application for archival storage of electronic documents. For that purpose there are other richer and more-robust applications of SGML. There are many commercial editing and processing systems for SGML (SGML will be a standard function of WordPerfect 7.0, and there are at least three SGML plug-ins for Microsoft Word, just to mention the products named in JTC1 N4054), and there are free viewers available for the WWW as well as for other uses. The ISO Central Secretariat has been using another application (documented in ISO/IEC TR 9573-11) for the storage and production of standards for a decade now. WG8 has developed its own application and uses it for many of its documents. If HTML is desired for online presentation, it is relatively simple to generate it automatically from other SGML applications.