Standards are everywhere. Has an airline ever lost your luggage? Chances are, the error was caused by a human, not the standardized code that appears on the baggage tag. In 1949, the U.S. government imposed standards on manufacturers; they were created to allow all phones to talk to all other phones. Surely you’ve heard of group III and IV fax standards. No? Well, without them, chances are fax machines would only talk to other machines from the same manufacturer.

People are collaborating on uniform best practices, exchange formats and agreed to responses in the publishing industry because the variability in response and practice is costing us all millions of dollars. The problem is not old nor special to publishing and has corollaries in other industries (automobile, financial) and social systems.

This SPACE/XML standards effort is about creating an industry standard with the tangible value of streamlining business tasks saving money and time. Please join into the discussion and most importantly, the implementation, "to achieve shared ends".