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I'll second what Joe said, and elaborate on it: the consortium responsible
is one thing and which vendors and groups are pushing it are something else.
If the committee that created the spec has a bunch of companies I never
heard of, or if big companies I have heard of have each packed the
membership with multiple members, that's a big difference.
Related issue: did the committee come up with the spec from scratch or did
they tweak something submitted by someone else, and if so, by who.
Competing vs. complementary specs: someone wondering whether to pay
attention to a particular spec can easily be confused by its relationships
to related specs. Sometimes specs that seem to address the same issue are
actually addressing a different layer of the issue, sometimes they're
directly competing. DRM and B2B standards are both good examples.
Where are samples: I'm continually amazed at the amount of XML-based specs
for which examples of valid XML are difficult or impossible to find. If you
have a schema for the data specified by the spec, make it easy to find data
that conforms to the schema and demonstrates *every* element and attribute
in the schema. This helps to justify the presence of each element and
attribute, which is part of a spec's job.
Bob DuCharme www.snee.com/bob <bob@
snee.com> "The elements be kind to thee, and make thy
spirits all of comfort!" Anthony and Cleopatra, III ii
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