Re: [xml-dev] W3C Rants (was: RE: W3C as Golden Goose ...)

[Dave Winer <dave@userland.com>]

Mike did the BigCo's contribute anything of value to the Web?

Would the Web have been better off playing hardball when it was driving the
growth of  the industry?

Dave

 > The collaborative standardization of web technology worked very well for
a
> few years, when the "internet revolution" was providing the rising tide
that
> floated all boats, and while the intellectual capital of the academic -
> government - scientific internet collaboration was laying on the ground
> waiting to be harvested.  The W3C process has bogged down very seriously
in
> the last couple of years because of IP concerns, because the ".bomb" made
> the people who can actually do standards work effectively badly needed for
> more lucrative work (or they just plain burned out), and because the
> technology is getting into terra incognita. XML, XSLT, XPath and HTML were
> "laying around waiting to be harvested" from seeds sown by SGML, DSSSL,
> filesystems/string matching, and various SGML document DTDs.  Technologies
> for typing, inheriting, querying, rendering, linking, adding semantics to
> syntax, etc. have to be grown from seed (or hybridized from lots of
diverse
> sources) and it's an open question whether the W3C process will work for
> that.