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At 08:36 PM 5/20/2003 -0700, Paul Prescod wrote:
>Adam Turoff wrote:
>>...
>>The one thing that *is* clear from Jim Waldo's piece is that premature
>>standardization, like premature optimization, is an unnecessary evil in
>>this business.
>
>Fair enough. But when the standard comes too late, a proprietary "de jure"
>standard may have an unassailable position in the marketplace.
Precisely - this is the main reason that web standards tend to be done in
advance of widespread deployment. Also, for many web technologies,
interoperability matters from the beginning. Perhaps the W3C could have
waited 5 years to standardize HTML, adopting whatever form of HTML
succeeded in the free market, but that might have made it extremely
difficult for smaller vendors and would have resulted in huge
incompatibilities among browsers.
Also, note that it can be difficult to bring together a team of experts,
including experts from the major software companies, to design something we
hope will become a "de facto" standard without doing it under the auspices
of a standards body that ensures fair play.
Jonathan
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