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RE: participating communities (was XML Blueberry)
- From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>
- To: Frank Richards <frichards@softquad.com>, xml-dev@lists.xml.org
- Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2001 15:21:14 -0500
Title:
As
long as we understand that, fine. There is no difference except
that
ISO works for governments and the W3C works for private companies.
Well,
yes there are big differences but we don't have to hash those out here.
It's
all been said before.
You
understood DSSSL? Wow. That ten or 12 year cycle of
development must be worth the price. SGML?
You worked for
SoftQuad and didn't understand it? That must have been
hard
come salary review time. As for Hytime, neither did I and it
wasn't
for lack of trying. What I did understand was elegant. Now
groves, that became clearer but again, we'd have to back off the
W3C to
use that.
Now,
who owns the intellectual property of markup? The commons? The
people
through their representatives own SGML. Companies
through their
representatives own XML. That's what the constitution
on this side of the border
says anyway and you have confirmed.
Thanks. Blueberry is a business decision for the W3C. Case
closed.
And
SGML is a proprietary product. For Jane Developer at Mom's Code (or Keene NH
City hall if you want the government sector), The effective difference between
the ISO and the W3C is that ISO docs have to be ordered at great expense and
those from the w3c can be downloaded for free. Secondarily, w3c specs are
comprehensible to any skilled developer. SGML, HyTime and Arch Forms are all
incomprehensible word clouds. (Someody goofed on DSSSL, I understood that
one)
But
day to day there's no effective difference. The orgs it matters to are the
global 2000 businesses, and sovereign governments. W3C answers to the first,
ISO to the second.
Yeah
there's plenty wrong with business, but I totally fail to comprehend how
any survivor of the 20th century can think governments are
better.
I
don't have an answer to the Blueberry problem, but I won't buy canonizing the
ISO.