> -----Original
Message-----
> From: David Brownell [mailto:david-b@pacbell.net]
> Sent: Friday, August 03, 2001 6:56 PM
>
To: Bullard, Claude L (Len); Winchel 'Todd' Vincent III; Tom Bradford
>
Cc: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Subject: Re: ISO intellectual property (was
Standards)
>
>
> Also, what to do about the vendor
community
> that's touting W3C specs as "standards", while
> W3C has
been at best sluggish to fill in essential
> gaps like conformance testing
and what might be
> called "brand maintainence". (Vendors seem
free
> to use the W3C trademarks without being notably
>
spec-conformant...)
This touches on another big difference (as I
understand it)
between "real" international standards and what the W3C
does.
If BigBozoCo claims to implement an ISO standard (ISO 9000,
maybe),
and it turns out that they are just kinda sorta
working within the "spirit"
of ISO 9000 but don't ACTUALLY
have people waste their valuable time filling
out those
boring documents, someone (ISO? a government? a
disgruntled
customer?) is likely to take legal action against them.
But
if BigBozoCo's claims to implement the W3C XML Schema spec, and
it
turns out that they didn't actually have the developers waste their
valuable
time implementing all those boring
types or content models, nobody can do
anything except whine about it.
Is this not true?