Editing EDIF (section)

=== Solutions to EDIF 2 0 0 problems ===

The solution to the "flavor" problem of EDIF 2 0 0 was to develop a more specific semantic description in EDIF 3 0 0 (1993). Indeed, reported results of people generating EDIF 3 0 0 translators was that the writers were now ''much'' more difficult to get right, due to the great number of semantic restrictions, and the readers are comparatively trivial to develop.

The solution to vendor "conflict of interest" was neutral third-party companies, who could provide EDIF products based on vendor interfaces. This separation of the EDIF products from direct vendor control was critical to providing the end-user community with tools that worked well. It formed naturally and without comment. [[Engineering DataXpress]] was perhaps the first such company in this realm, with [[Electronic Tools Company]] seeming to have captured the market in the mid to late 1990s. Another dynamic in this industry is EDIF itself. Since they have grown to a rather large size, generating readers and writers has become a very expensive proposition. Usually the third-party companies have congregated the necessary specialists and can use this expertise to more efficiently generate the software. They are also able to leverage code sharing and other techniques an individual vendor could not.  By 2000, almost no major vendor produced its own EDIF tools, choosing instead to [[original equipment manufacturer|OEM]] third-party tools.

Since the release of EDIF 4 0 0, the entire EDIF standards organisation has essentially dissolved. There have been no published meetings of any of the technical subcommittees, the EDIF Experts group, etc. Most of the individuals involved have moved on to other companies or efforts. The newsletter was abandoned, and the Users' Group no longer holds yearly meetings. EDIF 3 0 0 and 4 0 0 are now [[American National Standards Institute|ANSI]], [[International Electrotechnical Commission|IEC]] and European (EN) standards.  EDIF Version 3 0 0 is IEC/EN 61690-1, and EDIF Version 4 0 0 is IEC/EN 61690-2.