XPS and JFIF approved as Ecma standards
Martin Bailey at 09:10 GMT on 17 June 2009
In June of 2007 Ecma TC46 took over development of the XPS specification from Microsoft. After two years of hard work and fixing over 200 issues the new Ecma standard for OpenXPS (Ecma-388) was approved yesterday. Like all Ecma standards it can be freely downloaded: get it HERE.
Also approved yesterday was a formal JFIF technical report. The JFIF specification defines a file format for a JPEG-compressed image, and was written quite a while ago by an informal group lead by Tom Lane, and has been referenced and implemented very widely, but it’s never had any official home; you just had to trawl the net to find a copy (probably ending up with one unofficially hosted by the W3C). TC46 worked with Tom, and liaised with ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29 (the home of JPEG) to bring out a technical report that is technically identical to the informal specification to enable other standards to reference it in a more robust way. JFIF is published as TR/98 and available HERE.
Congratulations to all of TC46 on a job well done.
There’s more information about TC46 HERE.
And more on XPS, both the format and Global Graphics’ technologies HERE.
Martin
