This paper reports on considerations about the common basic functions and components for building a collaborative authoring environment. The paper aims to specify and systematize the technological issues towards the future standardization of such environments, based on the authors' previous research experiences. Standardization includes many difficult aspects, however, it will extend and widen the field of applications possible within the collaborative and cooperative authoring paradigm, and will enable the usage of the fruits of years of research and individual implementations of the concept of collaborative, but mostly, cooperative authoring. This paper tries to set a systematic basis for a common collaborative authoring platform. (Contains 18 references.) (Author)