The Formation of the IEEE P1874 "O Manual" Working Group [Standards Corner]

It is now official that the IEEE Standards Board has approved the P1874 Standard for development, i.e., a working group has been formed. It was a hard-won battle over many months to get the wording correct on the initial project authorization request (PAR) document. The O Manual specification is an XML-based package format for distributing procedural manuals. A manual can describe a collection of procedures, or just a single procedure. This specification describes the O Manual bundle file format (a collection of structured files), a file manifest XML format, a topic XML format, and a procedure XML format. The specification may be expanded in the future to enable additional types of documents. This standard allows repair manuals to be used across multiple platforms such as e-readers, tablets, smartphones, Web sites and the like, for users to be able to repair electronic devices. It does not mandate how or why to repair these devices. The repair manuals are created by any individual or corporate entity that chooses to participate. The standard only specifies that when the manual is created, it should adhere to a uniform set of XML schemas, which will allow interoperability of the manuals on multiple formats.