RE: The lists I monitor

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

At 10:27 AM 5/7/01 -0700, Don Box wrote:
>It's not a W3C thing. It's a "it's easy to set up yet another list on
>the Internet" thing. Think back a year ago or so when XML-DEV was
>failing. At least once a month someone would set up a list on egroups or
>wherever, yet people saw the benefits of having a single "normative"
>forum rather than dozens of splinter lists to monitor.

Maybe I'm crazy, but I monitor about 20 XML lists.  It's not that 
difficult, and I know people who monitor many more lists than that.  Each 
(surviving) list has its own community, and there's definitely value to 
much of the splintering.  Lists I don't monitor closely just get dumped 
into a common 'xmlcorrespondence' bucket.  Works pretty well.

As for "it's not a W3C thing", I have to agree that "it's not a coordinated 
W3C thing".  Unfortunately there seems to be an attitude that W3C lists are 
_the_ lists, with rare exception - like this one and XSL-List, both of 
which predate widespread interest in the technologies they cover.  RDF and 
XLink lists both moved into the W3C, and I'm not sure that XLink has 
benefited.  (I don't follow RDF as closely, but it seems to have a happier 
ending supported by a more open W3C activity.)

>I really doubt that Henry is acting as part of some W3C-wide plan to
>stifle discussion; rather, my guess is he is just a lone gunman acting
>on his own on this one.

And Dan Connolly was a lone gunman for XHTML-L, and I'm sure other lone 
gunmen are out there.

It's not a conspiracy - it's just a shared perspective, one I don't happen 
to share.


Simon St.Laurent - Associate Editor, O'Reilly & Associates
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
XHTML: Migrating Toward XML
http://www.simonstl.com - XML essays and books