-----Original Message-----
From: Simon St.Laurent [SMTP:simonstl@simonstl.com]
Sent: Wednesday, October 25, 2000 11:49 AM
To: xml-dev@xml.org
Cc: www-xml-schema-comments@w3.org
Subject: Re: XML Schemas: the wrong name
> But since people tend to start
> looking for XML specs at the W3C, they may never even hear of the
> competition...
Is that true? My guess would be that people look for "specs" at Borders or Amazon, or the major vendors' websites, or by searching the Web for FAQs and tutorials. If the the main answer answer is "Borders or Amazon", the writers who explain the technologies may be more influential than the W3C participants who write them in determining which become widely accepted. If the answer is "the big vendors", the game is over, since Oracle, IBM, and (more tentatively) Microsoft have firmly supported W3C XSD, and none are supporting Relax.
Seriously, does anyone have hard information on how people learn about the details of new Internet technologies? Will the small subset of Internet users who care about schemas (broadly defined) care what Microsoft or Oracle thinks if they can get the necessary tools to support RELAX or whatever from somewhere else? Or, perhaps more importantly, will the Pointy Haired Bosses of the people who do the work care about this enough to enforce whatever the conventional wisdom says?
