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And the response to that must be a tightening of our
language by formally attaching some semantics. This
isn't rocket science and certainly different organizations
can do better or worse jobs at it, but unless some
discipline and formal definitions are used, the FUDdieDuddies win.
IP keiretsu may not be better except in this respect:
given some technical domain, one knows who to trust,
and given some participation agreement, why. Once
done, then the issue of what is and isn't a standard
is a matter of picking a documentation process group.
We don't need ISO to protect us from each other; we
need them to manage the documentation processes for
work we create after signing agreements that protect
us from each other.
Then when some private company announces they are
going to ECMA to fast track to ISO, they are easy
to spot. I've no problems working with proprietary
XML languages because I have to. I've big problems
with those being called standards without due process.
len
From: Robin Cover [mailto:robin@isogen.com]
I don't see any solution to the problem of authority WRT what is
(in)appropriate for designation as a "standard" since opinions vary
widely. I can't imagine a world court promulgating and enforcing
a rule that "only such-and-such things may be called 'standards';
language academies largely fail in such efforts, and so would a
global edict. We have the anomaly of XML *not* being called a
standard by its SDO/SSO, while it clearly has the force of a
standard; other specs are called "standards" by their respective
SDO/SSO -- just because the creating body said so. At one time,
OASIS declared that it did not create standards, now we have
CDs being voted by the membership to become an "OASIS Standard."
And so forth, for hundreds of similar SDO/SSO orgs, and the
meta-definitions are not agreed upon.
Robin Cover
(speaking for no corporate entity)
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