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Dare Obasanjo wrote:
>
> Tell me about it, I'm already experiencing this first hand (XQuery
> depends on W3C XML Schema). What I find interesting is that Henry T is
> equating "new work" with the kind of work a *standards* body is
> supposed to be tackling. This seems to be the opposite of what a body
> that should be setting "standards" should be doing and it shows in the
> current family of technologies coming out of the W3C.
Okay, but let's acknowledge market realities: as we've seen many times,
when the standards body refuses to take the lead, vendors do. And what
happens is that industry's technologies become "de facto standards."
This puts "leading vendors" in a position to use their power to redirect
the standards landscape unilaterally. Netscape did that with HTML
extensions. Sun did that with J2EE. Microsoft et. al. did that with
SOAP/WSDL. An even more destructive situation is where two leading
vendors try to rest control of the standards from each other as in the
HTML wars.
In an imperfect world, I prefer a W3C that tries to lead the way. One
reason we never saw a war between NetscapeML and MsML is because XML was
done before either of them realized they needed a generic markup
technology.
Let's put it this way: when a standards body creates a specification
that doesn't meet people's needs it just disappears quietly. When a big
vendor does, it creates a huge amount of costly churn and reinvention.
Paul Prescod
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