[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
- From: Jonathan.Robie@SoftwareAG-USA.com
- To: simonstl@simonstl.com, xml-dev@xml.org
- Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2000 13:06:23 -0400
Title: RE: standards body parallel
Simon St.Laurent wrote:
> Anyone interested in the politics of vendor consortia
> might want to take a look at this article:
>
> http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2640166,00.html?chkpt=zdhp
news01
>
> I don't know how it'll turn out, but it suggests that the model used for
> the creation of XML and XML-related specs at the W3C is not everyone's
> favorite.
Are you calling the W3C a vendor consortium along the lines of the one described in this article?
This was a meeting of Intel's P2P computing working group.
> Why are we doing research and development for Intel?"
> asked one developer to applause.
This looks like a rather different model from that of the W3C, which was designed to provide a vendor-neutral forum. The people quoted in your article seem to have been upset largely by the fact that their forum was dominated and controlled by one vendor. On the Working Groups, each company gets one vote - sure, big companies have more resources for lobbying, and are more likely to be able to devote full-time developers to help with the technical work.
HTML, XML, HTTP, XSLT, XPATH, the DOM, and other core W3C standards have been extremely helpful to startups, individual developers, etc., and they have not been tightly controlled by the big players. The core technologies work. They are widely used. By this criterion, the W3C is a flaming success. Some W3C standards are markedly less successful. That's not surprising nor disturbing. On the whole, if you want to influence the future of XML and the Internet, the W3C is a very good place to do so.
It is not the only good place to do this. IETF and ISO have developed very important standards, and SAX was developed without a standards body. But I think that the work of the W3C has created many of the technologies that provide the basic tools for XML developers, and there would be no reason to have an xml-dev mailing list if the W3C hadn't done this work.
Jonathan
|
