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8/29/2002 12:59:14 PM, "Aaron Skonnard" <aarons@develop.com> wrote:
>Well since I'm not privy to how you measure such things at the W3C, I
>can't say if what's been expressed on this list officially constitutes
>consensus (probably not) but in my interactions with developers
>everywhere, and from what was expressed (again) in the recent threads
>relating to namespaces, from my perspective there seems to be strong, if
>unofficial, consensus that the namespaces specification, as it sits
>today, has caused major problems.
A couple of points. First, remember that the W3C is not what we
called a "unitary actor" during my mis-spent youth as a political
scientist. It's a consortium of competitors, headed by a Director
who is more renowned for his vision than his hands-on management
style, assisted by a very competent professional staff that has
very little formal power, guided by various committees/groups/
boards, and in which muost actual work is done by volunteers who
take the time from their day jobs or real lives. This does
not make for an organization that can change its mind very easily,
even if it had a single "mind" to change.
Second, as others have pointed out, the problem is growing obvious,
but the solution is not. A slimmed down/refactored namespace spec?
Some Best Practices that need to be defined, leading eventually
to some deprecated features? Some variant of architectural
forms? Some RDF-ish approach to disambiguate the semantics
of overlapping tagnames?
I [personally, not speaking for employer or W3C] think that it's
time for discussion and experimentation with alternatives and
refining of best practices with the current stuff, and that dumping
the issue back on the W3C would be unproductive to counterproductive.
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