The International Organization for Standardization (ISO), based in Geneva, Switzerland, is the world's center for diplomatic cooperation. The ISO is composed of national standards bodies that maintain thousands of specifications to enable things to work together properly. The ISO is sort of a United Nations for standards.
The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) is the U.S. member body of the ISO and sets standards for the U.S. market. Other countries have similar standards bodies. Each member body of the ISO has a single vote on ISO committees. Countries that do not have fully developed standards organizations are represented in the ISO as correspondent members. This is a nonvoting membership, but bodies from these countries are kept fully informed about the work of interest to them. Subscriber members are representatives from countries with small economies. They pay reduced fees to the ISO to maintain regular contact with the international standards community. As you learned in the previous chapter, the ISO created and maintains XML's progenitor, SGML.