RE: Standards (yet again) was RE: Use of XML ?

["Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>]

Title:

Don't base it on the organization.  Base it on the customer and

the nature of the contract established by it with regard to compliance

and conformance among contracting parties.  

 

People keep turning this into the W3C (The Good Guys) against

the world (Everyone Else).  It is not that simple.  By pursuing

the course that the W3C is a standards body, they are forced

to support effort and processes that distract them from being

able to incubate technology.   They are the Good Guys only

insofar as they achieve that.  When they attempt to be a

governing body, they are just "The New Boss" and the

counterrevolution will follow quickly.

 

The system that enables government customer to declare

standards, vendors to support and create specifications, and

standards to normatively reference specifications works. 

 

What you have now is leading to a collision of governing authority

and that will mean the end of the W3C as an effective

source of engineering specifications.   They are already

becoming arthritic.   Don't do this.  You are screwing the pooch

for a satisfaction that will be weak and unsustainable.

Len Bullard
Intergraph Public Safety
clbullar@ingr.com
http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard

Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h

-----Original Message-----
From: Mike.Champion@SoftwareAG-USA.com [mailto:Mike.Champion@SoftwareAG-USA.com]
I'm of two minds on this ...

The "right thing" is probably to insist that "standards" come from recognized international standards bodies (there are only 4, right -- the ISO, ITU, CCITT, ? ... and the national standards organizations affiliated with them.  Everything else is just a commonly-supported / de-facto specification.  But almost no one seems to actually use this definition ... and it does exclude things that have some legitimate claim to be "standards", such as W3C Recommendations and IETF Internet Standards.  Also, it enshrines as "standards" such things that made it through the ISO process but don't have significant numbers of real-world implementations or cross-vendor support (FOSI and DSSSL come to mind).