xml-dev - Re: sunshine and standards development

[Rick JELLIFFE <ricko@geotempo.com>]

"Simon St.Laurent" wrote:
> 
> Mike Champion wrote:
> >In this scheme of things, the problem is that people see the W3C
> >as both crafting technologies out of thin air and having their
> >Recommendations treated as if they were standards.
> 
> Exactly.  The results of the 'research lab' are posted as more-or-less
> final, and only in rare cases (like ISO HTML) is there another process
> creating STANDARD standards on top of them.

As some-one else has noted, ISO (and national standards bodies) have
faced a real problem with the advent of the WWW that they funded
themselves largely by publication charges.  This is not a business model
that can compete against WWW feebies: so future ISO standardization will
tend to be for things that are not related to the web or for which there
may be legal disputes or political initiatives.  

Furthermore ISO standardization is a guarantee that a process has been
adhered to and not a guarantee the result is useful.  And especially it
is not a guarantee that the result is useful on the desktop.  However,
most people don't know how many things they use are benefits of ISO
standardization (characters sets, computer keyboard positions and
layouts, the meter [except in US]).  OSI software has different
characteristics from TCP/IP and has been very useful for the
applications that need it.  ISO has been a very successful standards
organization.

From outside North America, there will be some scepticism of IETF: they
ignored the "selective ACK" problem in TCP/IP and fiddled around doing
nothing for multilingual domain name service, for example. These are two
very fundamental technologies of the internet, and the issues would have
been addressed years ago if the disciplines of ISO or W3C were imposed. 

I think the better question is "how can we make standardizing or
Standardizing bodies which create 20-page-spec technologies?"    Vendors
and implementors want to have features that fit in with their
conceptions; when they get together they will compromise; the resulting
specs will always tend to be larger rather than smaller.  XML edition 2
has shrink because it can reference RFCs more, but in general specs will
get bigger over time. 

Cheers
Rick Jelliffe