Although its Spec 1170 Unix work has consumed the major portion of X/Open Co Ltd’s resources lately, it has other projects on the go that are equally significant, including the desktop requirements workgroup which is seeking to specify common mechanisms for data exchange and windowing across Unix, Windows, Macintosh and other environments. X/Open says it knows what it wants to specify, and that there are few technical impediments vendors would need to overcome. But considering the fraught nature of interoperability issues, there is a lack of political will, and in some cases open indifference. X/Open admits it can bide its time until market conditions create the appropriate atmosphere for its requirements to be used. It is, nevertheless, trying to take some of the political heat out of issue by presenting the offering at the server level, not at the sensitive front end. As well as specifying stuff like common data definitions of compound documents so that data can be cut and pasted between documents, graphics, and drawing in any application and common mail server operations, the desktop group envisages, for example, an application asking a class library on the server how it should put up a window on another screen. X/Open says that its difficulty lies in extending specification branding to multiple relationships where common agreement is required to solve potentially conflicting operations and services. Other X/Open work includes a common document project to which Hewlett-Packard Co, IBM Corp, Novell Inc, the Open Software Foundation and Sun Microsystems Inc have already subscribed, that will deliver standard, branded documentation and product implementations either stand-alone or integrated into other company documentation. The project is using Standardised General Mark-up Language initially, with other formats likely. Its first implementation is the SGML documentation for Spec 1170, which is available on CD-ROM with Electronic Book Technology Inc’s Dynatext display tool for all major Unixes, Windows and Macintosh, along with the GoSolo book describing Spec 1170 that is published by Prentice Hall at $70. X/Open has already talked to the Davenport group, which is working on common document formats, and it may take Davenport specification snapshots for use in its project.
