xml-dev - Re: SAX (Introduction, Recomandations, Future...)

[Peter Murray-Rust <peter@ursus.demon.co.uk>]

At 09:17 PM 2/8/00 -0800, Jon Bosak wrote:
>[Peter Murray-Rust:]
>

>I traded the domain name to OASIS in return for an individual
>membership.

Thanks for the clarification, Jon. I think this was a valuable contribution.

>
>I don't think that anyone owns SAX, OASIS included, but I strongly
>believe that further work on it should be conducted in a properly
>constituted OASIS technical committee so that the evolution of the
>specification from this point on is guaranteed to take place under
>a democratic process that is open to all interested parties,
>provides an IPR policy based on an open-source model, and is
>visible to the world at large.  The xml-dev list supplies
>visibility but not the rest of what's needed.

I fully agree about this. It has been very encouraging to see that de facto
protocols can develop, but there are many organisations that feel unquiet
about these until they are linked with a stable real-life organisation. In
developing Chemical Markup Language, for example, I and Henry ultimately
see this ending up under the aegis of a (chemical) learned society or
similar non-profit organisation. It is often very difficult to do this
"top-down" and I think there is a role for OASIS becoming a home for a
limited number of *robust* popular de facto approaches.

	P.