PHI-GKS is an interesting alternative proposal to the approved ISO graphics standards now in development.
The main goal of PHI-GKS seems to be to allow existing GKS and future GKS-2D applications to migrate to the added function to be provided by PHI-GKS. This justification is flawed in two ways. First, as the paper admits, it will be necessary to change existing applications to allow them to take advantage of the new functionality of PHI-GKS. Second, user experience has shown that such migration is in fact impractical and that a full rewrite of the application is needed to fully utilize hierarchical segmentation capabilities. Thus, PHI-GKS offers no substantive advantage over PHIGS in this regard.
There are two additional points to be made about the article.
First, PHI-GKS has been fully presented to the graphics experts of ISO TC 97 subcommittee 21 working group 2 (soon to become subcommittee 24) and failed to receive endorsement even as an alternative to PHIGS. Second although PHIGS was only brought to ISO in 1985, it was very mature at that time due to extensive development work in ANSI, which in fact has led to several commercial implementations.
To conclude, PHI-GKS is an excellent example of the strengths of the standards development process which permits exploratory efforts outside of standards but resists efforts of a minority group to influence future progress unduly.