This topic explains the benefits of standards and how they have been incorporated into 3B2. Increasing globalisation and the need for transference of information on a global scale make standards more important than ever. 3B2 already supports standards for a wide variety of technical publishing requirements. Advent continue to endeavour to incorporate existing standards that improve the performance of 3B2.
Advent recognises that the adoption and maintenance of processes and standards are essential for truly global solutions.
Standards are practices that are widely recognised or employed, especially because of their excellence. Because standards supply an acknowledged measure of comparison for quantitative or qualitative value they help to reach and maintain solutions for many complex publishing problems.
The increased requirement to use data in a variety of different formats and media has led to the need for more formal structuring, management and organisation. This has lead to many organisations embracing the use of databases and ISO standards such as SGML, CALS and XML to publish material and data, particularly when outputting electronically.
The points below describe some of the advantages of integrating standards:
All 3B2 documents and associated files are in ASCII and fully transferable across all the platforms and associated networks. The decisions at the initial development stage of 3B2 included the adoption of SGML as the method of data tagging. 3B2 is unique in this respect and is the only product available that maintains the integrity of SGML/XML and other markup language files without requiring a conversion process. For more information on data handling in 3B2 see the Data Handling topic.
3B2 is not restricted by standards. For example, it is not essential for 3B2 to have well formed data to function. As a result of our understanding of the production environment we appreciate that if you have to meet a print job deadline you may not be concerned whether your data is well formed or not. 3B2 does not restrict you to having to make your data well formed before loading it into or outputting it from 3B2.
Standards and conventions do not mean that custom solutions are ignored; instead Advent incorporates industry standards to produce complete solutions tailored for specific customers. As well as integrating standard practice procedure, 3B2 is also incredibly versatile and flexible. For more information see the Customisation topic.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
An industry consortium which seeks to promote standards for the evolution of the Internet:
See also