Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » Graphics standard OK'd

January 30, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Graphics standard OK'd

TAGS: Platforms

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and OASIS on Tuesday jointly announced publication of WebCGM (Computer Graphics Metafile) 2.0, an industry standard for technical illustrations in electronic documents.

Widely used in the defense, aviation, architecture and transportation industries, WebCGM 2.0 boasts new interoperability levels because of the collaboration between the two technology standards organizations, W3C and OASIS said.

"The result of this collaboration between OASIS and W3C is a single open standard for CGM on the Web that has been approved by the membership of both our organizations," said Patrick Gannon, president and CEO of OASIS, in a prepared statement released by W3C and OASIS. "This degree of endorsement assures implementers around the world that they can adopt WebCGM with confidence."

CGM is an ISO standard for a tree-structured, binary graphics format adopted especially by technical industries.

Version 2.0 of WebCGM adds a DOM (Document Object Model) API specification for programmatic access to WebCGM objects and a specification of an XML Companion File architecture for externalization of non-graphical metadata. It also extends the graphical and intelligent content of WebCGM 1.0.

Officially, WebCGM 2.0 has been approved as an OASIS Standard and a W3C Recommendation, which are the highest levels of ratification within these two organizations.

Posted by Paul Krill on January 30, 2007 12:26 PM

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