xml-dev - conclusions on standards

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

Michael Champion wrote:
>My basic conclusion from reading these threads for the last week 
>or so is that there is room in the XML community for wide-open 
>collaboration to incubate technologies (IETF or OASIS TC's ???), 
>less open collaboration on how to compete in the technology space 
>without imposing undue misery on the industry (the W3C?), and a 
>formal process for creating carved-in-stone standards (ISO?).  
>Each of these occupies a useful niche in the ecology of the 
>Internet, it's a waste of time to try to get one organization 
>to do it all or to force any organization to live by the rules 
>of a different niche.

If all of those were equally capable of filling their niches and met user
needs the way it sounds they should, then this discussion would have been a
lot less interesting, most likely.

The W3C has effective non-competes with IETF and OASIS, and doesn't seem,
well, very interested in ISO.  If all of these possibilities either fed
into each other smoothly or functioned competitively, I think there'd be a
lot less room for complaining about process.

Since that doesn't seem to be the case... I'm not sure what conclusions we
can reach, except that there's room for disagreement and maybe improvement.


Simon St.Laurent
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
XHTML: Migrating Toward XML
http://www.simonstl.com - XML essays and books