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

[Richard Tobin <richard@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>]

>Because there is now relentless and seemingly
>unstoppable privatization of public assets.

I had always thought that one of the functions of the W3C was to
prevent that.  HTML and XML are public assets even though the W3C is
not a government-sponsored standards body, and it seems likely that
without them Microsoft would dominate the market with some
proprietary, non-interoperable equivalent.

Similarly the W3C tries to limit the damage caused by such nonsense as
Sun's XLink patent.  Maybe it doesn't succeed, but it seems to be on
the right side.

-- Richard