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   RE: [xml-dev] W3C Successes (RE: [xml-dev] W3C Culture and Aims )

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That isn't always a bad outcome.  They have to support 
what they sell as long as they entered into maintenance 
contracts.  Otherwise, liquidated damages follow.

And the Justice Department won't call it collusion unless 
they are secretly planning.  The specification organizations 
give them a management system for cooperation.  They still 
have to write and submit specification drafts.

De facto standards dominate the Internet.   That's what 
successful technologies built over specifications are.  

The best way to solve the boring standards work problem 
is to use organizations competent at managing the boring 
phase.  Use ISO.  Again, the right people at the right 
place doing the work they are good at.  This is obvious.

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathan Robie [mailto:jonathan.robie@datadirect-technologies.com]

At 10:03 AM 4/25/2002 -0700, Paul Prescod wrote:
>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.

Bingo.

Worse yet, if two or more of these vendors try to agree on one way of doing 
things, it can be seen as collusion by the Justice Department, and the 
companies can be sued for trying to cooperate. This is why the HTML browser 
vendors were so keen to have a body to oversee their cooperation, and it's 
an important factor in most W3C Working Groups.

One might argue that W3C recommendations should be treated as openly agreed 
industry standards. One might also argue that there should be some way to 
decide which standards still matter in five years, clean them up, and do 
the boring standards work Mike prefers at that point.




 

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