[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
This is, of course, the standard propaganda technique known as poisoning
the well. Here are two good descriptions of this technique:
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/poisoning-the-well.html
http://seercom.com/bluto/skepticism/criticalthinking/irf.poiswell.html
An exerpt from the latter:
>Poisoning the well is an attempt to use the audience's prejudices against
>the opponent. It is also somewhat different than argument from
>circumstantial ad hominem in that the dismissal is typically suggested in
>advance of the opponent's argument being heard. A sort of pre-emptive strike.
The fact that something is developed by a standards body says little about
its relevance to a market or its future adoption.
XML, XPath, XSLT, DOM and CSS were all developed by standards bodies, and
have been widely accepted. RELAX NG has not achieved widespread adoption,
but the standardization of RELAX NG core has not hurt its design.
To evaluate any technology, standard or not, you have to examine it in
detail and understand the market to which it is aimed. If a given
technology is good and also standard, that is a good thing. Many standards
fail, and are not taken up in the marketplace. Many nonstandard
technologies also fail, and are not taken up in the marketplace. I don't
know of a good study that gives me the success rate for standards vs.
proprietary or open source initiatives, especially a study that focuses on
standards developed with the new approaches to standards development in
place in several organizations.
Regardless, I think the best approach is to use common sense:
1. If a standard solves your problem well, and you care about
interoperability, use it.
2. If no standard solves your problem well, you're stuck with a
non-standard solution.
3. If a nonstandard solution solves your problem more elegantly, and you
don't care about interoperability, you can feel free to use the nonstandard
solution.
4. Pronouncements about specific proposed standards are best made by those
who have read them carefully, used them, and understand them well enough to
make specific statements.
There's lots of standards that I ignore, even though I spend a lot of my
time working on standards.
Jonathan
|
