xml-dev - RE: sunshine and standards development

[Gavin Thomas Nicol <gtn@ebt.com>]

>*  Ad-hoc specs that come from a small group, often but 
>   not always with a "major power" sponsor.  

The interesting thing here is that quite often such
"ad-hoc" standards are less "ad-hoc" than what one
might think. Typically the small groups is *experienced*
in the area of the standard, and so have a great
deal of domain expertise. XML is a good example, 
as are VRML, the DOM and SAX (these latter two to a
slightly lesser degree).

My main concern with many of the recent "standards",
SOAP et al. being among them, is that they are *not*
advised by past experience. 

I would argue that in a number of cases the standards
that are being created are worse than they should be 
because either:

a) The space of the standard is so poorly understood
   in general that without experience in implementation
   to guide practise (as per IETF) no standardisation
   should take place. I put almost all XML messaging
   proposals into this bucket.

b) The representation on the standards committee is such
   that the voices of experience are drowned out. I have
   seen this happen a number of times, and one form is
   "vendor pressure", where politics play more of a role
   than technical/market correctness.

>*  Pragmatic "let's compromise for the good of the 
>   consumer" specs from industry consortia, or 
>   de-facto standards from a dominant vendor. 

Quite often, these are "ad-hoc", but biased by
experience.

>* "Real" standards that rigorously define a 
>  vendor-neutral specification and strict conformance 
>  criteria. 

As we all know, these are the hardest to develop, and
take the longest to develop... simply because the standard
has to be complete. One can argue that ISO takes a long
time on some things simply because it is *thorough*.

> Nevertheless, as long as the W3C serves as the 
> "treaty organization" within which pragmatic 
> compromises that result in consensual 
> Recommendations are made, I don't believe that 
> more "sunshine" would help.

I would argue that in some cases, there is already
so much participation that (b) comes about, resulting
in large, unclear specifications.