xml-dev - Re: W3C and 'small vendors'.

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

At 07:27 AM 9/19/99 -0400, Daniel Veillard wrote:
>Paul Tchistopolskii:
>> "Hey! Just give me 5-10  teams, like renderx.com 
>> who are frustrated with W3C - constantly rejecting 
>> them - and we'l invent the lXML ( for free, like Linux 
>> was created). lXML will *not* conform to W3C 
>> specs but will *work*right*now*".
>
>  Not to be annoying, but I think there is a myth here.
>
>If you think that rolling your own standard is in anyway similar to
>the Linux approach (and hence expecting the wide acceptance it got)
>you're IMHO really wrong.
>  Linux was successful partly because it did stick to the POSIX standard
>far better than most commercial OSes. I guess there is only one 
>exception where Linus decided to change the behaviour from the spec
>because, well it was clearly broken !

I think, actually, that 'reinventing XML' wouldn't be so difficult, in part
because XML and SGML provide a similar foundation to POSIX.  The problems
are relatively well understood, and evolving XML in an open fashion is
conceivable.  Creating processors that use such evolution would require
commitment from developers, but perhaps the ownership that comes with
participation could spur such work, much as many of the early XML parsers
came from people who were actually involved in the development of XML 1.0.

Getting widespread support might be difficult, but there are plenty of ways
to keep an 'Open XML' within the XML tent - by creating it as a subset, for
instance, that would be interoperable.  Tools like processing instructions
can be used to insure that interoperability was maintained, while allowing
'Open XML' to go its own way on issues deemed important.

I'm not sure I'm ready to support such a project, but feasibility doesn't
seem to be a problem.  The trademark on XML might be more of a problem, but
Linux did find a way around that - by not calling it Unix(tm).  

Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer (2nd Ed - September)
Building XML Applications
Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical
Sharing Bandwidth / Cookies
http://www.simonstl.com

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