Talk:ISO 10303-21

Can somebody point out the difference between ISO 10303-21 and ISO 10303-214? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 145.7.17.100 (talk • contribs) 08:51, 30 November 2005
 * See List of STEP (ISO 10303) parts:
 * Part 21 - STEP-File Clear text encoding of the exchange structure
 * Part 214 - Core data for automotive mechanical design processes
 * One is an implementation method (defines the physical file format), and the other is an Application Protocol ... what's not to understand? &mdash;Dennette 03:46, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

This entry is largely devoid of useful information for those interested in a comparison between capabilities of different exchange formats for surfaces and solids. For anyone interested in assisting, see the wikipedia page for IGES format which mentions the capabilities and that STEP format supposedly is to replace IGES. However IGES is not even mentioned in this entry.

ISO 10303-21 is not directly related to IGES. Only when it is used to exchange application data along the data models defined in STEP APs 203 or 214 we can establish a relation. AP203/214 are successors of IGES. -- Lothartklein (talk) 17:46, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Plain Language Definition
Nowhere do I see a definition offered of what a step file is for and what it is supposed to do. Kortoso (talk) 20:36, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

List of Programs?
It's not very helpful to know that in such and such year some standard allowed longer file names or whatever but not whether there are any existing free or commercial programs that can open files written in the damn standard, is it? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 137.99.98.96 (talk) 18:04, 23 June 2014 (UTC)

New edition in 2016
There is a new edition of this standard. See http://www.iso.org/iso/home/store/catalogue_ics/catalogue_detail_ics.htm?csnumber=63141 According to the intro on the ISO page, "ISO 10303-21:2016 adds anchor, reference and signature sections to support external references, support for compressed exchange structures in an archive, digital signatures and UTF-8 character encoding." Perhaps an expert can provide more context. — Preceding unsigned comment added by SwanQ (talk • contribs) 13:15, 23 December 2016 (UTC)

Criticism Section
The last three remarks in the criticism section do not relate to the encoding (ISO 10303-21), but would appear to refer to data schemas that have been used with STEP encodings (e.g. ISO 10303-242: Managed model based 3D engineering). There's no reason a color can't be represented as a simple integer field, and having multiple ways of modeling the same thing is attributable to the data schema -- which can happen in any programming language or data encoding format, and has no relevance to this topic. While the first two remarks relate to ISO 10303-21, the last three do not; perhaps they should moved to the data schema where such comments are applicable (e.g. ISO 10303-42 if that is the case, though with many schemas it's not entirely clear). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 205.237.115.6 (talk) 16:39, 27 April 2020 (UTC)