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That is the sort of thing that make some take
the W3C a little less seriously as a 'standards
organization':
1. There is seldom if ever a reason for a public
standard to be secret information, nor any of the
information which has acted in a policy role with
regard to its acceptance. There is if this is
actually a private specification for a system whose
design is shared among the members of that private
organization. This is the difference in a commons
and private property. The former enables cooperation;
the latter enables competition.
2. Policies for the creation of dissemination of
the work products must be the same for all groups
that create standards under the aegis of a standards
organization with some limited flexibility accorded
to the chairs of the groups creating those. A private
organization has no such constraints but to mitigate
conflicts within that organization will evolve some
means of mitigation such as deferring to the authority
of a single group or individual within that organization.
The effectiveness of that will be limited by the
competence of that agent and the means accorded to that agent.
It is often said that the differences among these
organizations is not perceptible or that one
could not judge given the products. There is a
difference between temporal competence and
inbuilt limitations based on organizational
requirements. Caveat emptor. Individuals will
make a difference in a short run, but over the
long haul, institutional policies are more reliable.
One can tweak a Volkswagen to run like a Masserati.
It just won't run very long.
len
From: Simon St.Laurent [mailto:simonstl@simonstl.com]
At 10:42 AM 6/20/2003 -0500, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
>Are the W3C implementations *reference* implementations
>or *sample* implementations? IOW, how is the implementation
>tied to the specification in terms of features and proof
>of conforming and compliant implementation? Are any public source?
>Are they tied normatively to the spec or informatively?
This information is not public, certainly not a spec-by-spec basis.
From what I can gather, different Working Groups appear to have very
different criteria, but few of them take the time to explain the criteria,
at least in public.
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