xml-dev - Re: sunshine and standards development

[Rick JELLIFFE <ricko@geotempo.com>]

Karl Dubost wrote:

> The conspiracy theory.

Even though, obviously, I think Simon is wrong and over-shrill on this, 
I think it is pretty poor to write off what he is saying as "conspiracy
theory."  

Simon rattles the monkey cage on this every year.  

Why?  Not because he is a frothing, mad-eyed, carpet-biting loon AFAIK,
but because he cares about trying to find out what the role is for "the
rest of us" (I have to exclude myself, since I am happily involved in
the evil empire) for affecting Internet technologies at a time when they
are being almost utterly corporatized. 

I think he is warning little more than Gearge Bernard Shaw's famous
dictum "Every profession turns into a conspiracy against the public."  
Shrugging off criticism as "conspiracy theory" looks like evidence that
it may be true.   He is saying little more than questioning that we
should accept "what is good for the members of W3C is good for America".

I like the W3C and ISO because they have policies in place to minimize
Western/English/conventionally-abled  bias in their recommendations. 
(Though I think academia should play its social role of providing
non-commercial-centered experts to counterbalance the commercial
representatives more, though.  And authors should have access under
non-disclosure to IG records so that they can explain things better.) 
Homemade specs and open-source implementations have a lousy record on
that.  

If the XML community had any idea of how XML Schemas would turn out, I
have no doubt that there would have been a community project making an
alternative much earlier.  There is a substantial community who just
want a simple language to do validation, and for whom features or
writing designed to make XML Schemas fit in with XML Query has negative
utility.  If it seems that upcoming W3C technologies have moved XML from
its "straightforwardly-usable" premise and hijacked it into some wormish
system of interlocking specs which will require special tools and much
brow-furrowing, of course that is an issue for concern.  People are
talking of XML Schemas as XML 2.0: and there are many people who don't
necessarily want an XML 2.0 anything like that.

After the MS decision, we cannot reasonably expect people to give large
companies the benefit of the doubt that the direction they influence W3C
technologies towards is always in the public interest.   There are many
strange decisions made in W3C specs which have a rational basis but
which are not available to outsiders: I know from the questions that
people ask me about XML Schemas that there are dozens of issues like
this.  Simon does not make things easier by injecting suspicion or
rancour into the air, but he is not being utterly unreasonable.


Rick Jelliffe
(writing in private capacity)