xml-dev - RE: standards body parallel

[Jonathan.Robie@SoftwareAG-USA.com]

Title: RE: standards body parallel

Simon St. Laurent wrote:

>  I'm happiest to see that developers are questioning
>  the wisdom of centralized models in which the big
>  players play key roles.

Small players can be extremely influential, due to the "meritocracy of geeks" factor, which also holds sway in the W3C. Each Working Group has a lot of work to be done. If you do the work, you get listened to. I used to work for a very small company, Texcel, but I found that the concerns that I raised were listened to in the W3C.

James Clark has been extremely influential without even working for a company, and has probably had more influence on XSLT than anybody else.

Henry Thompson, who works for the University of Edinburgh, is doing all the active editing for W3C XML Schema.

Tim Bray, an independent consultant, was one of the three editors of the XML spec, and certainly responsible for a lot of what went right with the design of XML.

SoftQuad, a small company, has strongly influenced the development of the DOM, and Lauren Wood, the chair, works for SoftQuad.

You simply don't need to work for a large company to be influential in the W3C.

> Not being an insider at the W3C, I have to speculate,
> but there are persistent rumors that companies with
> larger market share do in fact receive considerably
> more deference than smaller firms whose role in making
> standards succeed or fail is considered less substantial.
>
> That may just be realpolitik, of course.

In fact, realpolitik is precisely what it is.

If you want to create a standard for HTML or the DOM, you want Microsoft and Netscape to support it. If either of those parties say a decision causes them significant problems, that decision will generally be addressed. If it isn't adopted, it isn't a standard. If the major companies don't buy into it, and use something different, then there is no one standard. Each company may have only one vote, but each company tends to believe that adoption by the companies that are significant in a particular market is important.

On the other hand, if *any* member of a Working Group finds that a decision causes them significant pain in real development efforts, that is taken very seriously, and that member tends to get a solution to their problem.

Jonathan