Re: Why 90 percent of XML standards will fail

[Edd Dumbill <edd@usefulinc.com>]

On Mon, Feb 26, 2001 at 03:11:04PM -0500, David Megginson wrote:
> Tim Bray writes:
>  > Supposed to be on ZDNet somewhere, but I saw it on Yahoo.  The guy's
>  > right, of course, but remember Theodore Sturgeon's Law of Popular Art
>  > Forms, which extends nicely to XML (or any other) standards; it says:
[ ... ]
> If 10% (or even Sturgeon's 5%) of XML-based initiatives actually
> succeeded in any significant way, then XML would be an astounding
> success story.

Thank you for saying "initiatives" and not standards.  I'm still reeling
with nausea from hearing things like UDDI described as "standards" last
week at XML DevCon London.

All credit to David Turner of Microsoft who showed a slide displaying
which specifications in the "web services" arena were stable, in
progress or bluesky.  There was one box marked as stable.  XML 1.0.

-- Edd (off to revise his specification of CredulousML)