Editorial Notes

V3.2 - December 16, 1996

RFIs (requests for interpretation) added by Anton Ertl. Minor changes in appearance of See: references in wordset glossaries.

V3.1 - October 17, 1996

Format of anchors changed so that Mosaic can see them. File suffixes changed from .html to .htm to be more compatible with DOS/Unix.

V3.0 - September 14, 1996

This is a modification of Norman E. Smith's rendering of the draft standard (see his note below). Four changes have been made: (a) some errors have been corrected, (b) minor changes in the style of HTML presentation have been made to make it (hopefully) more readable, (c) hundreds of crosslinks have been added, and (d) the naming conventions for the internal sections of the document have been standardized so that it would be easy to crosslink to this document.

For example if I, or anyone, were writing a message on comp.lang.forth and I wanted to crosslink to the standard definition of CATCH then I would write something like

a=href http://wherever.document.is.stored/dpans9.htm#9.6.1.0875 CATCH /a

except that the phrases /a and a=href http:... are enclosed in angle brackets.

The standard is broken into 40 files:

The subdivision of Annex A is the only irregularity in this scheme and this was done both because it's not that hard to remember and also to break up what would otherwise be an unmanageably large annex. Within each file every subsection, sub-subsection, and sub-sub-subsection, etc. is named following the same conventions that the draft paper document uses.

The only problem with this whole scheme is that some of the files, in particular, sections 3 and 6, are large and therefore referencing them online can take a long time. As a practical matter I would recommend downloading all the files and using an html browser, like netscape, to access locally. Another solution that I am contemplating would be the breaking out of word definitions from sections 6 thru 17 into individual files. This would entail a more complicated cross-referencing, but I think it would still be manageable. It would also mean that online access might become rapid.

Mark Andrew Amerman
mandrewa@cais.com


V2.1 - September 1, 1995

This HTML version of this document was prepared by:

Norman E. Smith
72745,1566@Compuserve.com

It was prepared from the Microsoft Word document posted by the Technical Committee in early 1995. See their readme file for the details and conditions of using the postings. The Microsoft Word and Postscript versions of the document are available on ftp://ftp.uu.net/vendor/minerva... and a Postscript and FPC hyperlinked ASCII version are also available on Taygeta.

This second version has extensive hyperlinks added. These are content related. The 'See:' references to words link directly to their glossary entry for example. Because the original document was well structured and the conversion was to a proper HTML file, much of the hyperlink generation can be automated. Even though little had to be done manually, the large number of links and anchors caused the additional was more work than I expected.

The files that make up this document were created using Standardized Generalized Markup Language (SGML) based autotaging software. For this reason, all of the files also parse correctly with the current HTML Document Type Definitions (DTDs).

I am planning a third pass at the document to do a proper SGML representation of the word glossaries and additional links in the text. At that point, I will be able to generate a word glossary in just about any format.

The process of spliting the document into managable (about 20k) files, generating the Table of Contents, and inserting the structural hyperlinks was done with a program written in Until. Until is my almost-Forth, written in very generic C, that is also available on Taygeta. The Until Reference Manual can be browsed on Taygeta as well.

Lastly, thanks to the X3J14 Technical Committee for making the Word version of the document available and to Skip Carter for making space available on Taygeta for not only this document, but the wealth of other Forth infomation available there.

Changes:

03/30/95 - V2.0 - Added hundreds of anchors and links.

02/28/95 - V1.2 - The 02/23/95 version used an old version of the table of contents file with incorrect hyperlinks. This version corrects that. Sorry!

02/23/95 - V1.1- Added title page from original document that was lost during initial conversion per request of the Technical Committee.

Enjoy!
Norman Smith