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No. Hard numbers are soft because one has to
start with requirements for the numbers. The
question is really, how should one select a
team to create a standard to ensure success
by some measure of success?
I start with two positions:
1. Specifications and standards are different animals.
A standard is for a product in an established market. A
specification is for a product that does not yet exist
in an established market. This makes the rules for
selecting the team quite different.
2. There are large bodies of standards groups that are
not web-centric. Standards and specifications for
the web exist in a world that is quite different from
the majority body where a standard or specification is
for products with a small and local user base. To do
this with a large sample size, you will want to include
many organizations beyond the W3C.
In other words, pick a metric for success first. XML
succeeds wildly and quickly. Why? Markup was an
established market. OTOH, syndication is a
market being established. The success of the teams
varies and the specification bifurcated quickly. One
can say with some measure of truth that RSS is a
'failure' as a standard but 'successful' as a
specification for establishing a market. It is only
now in need of a standard. Which team has done the
best job of doing that, and what is the professional
standing of its members?
Keep in mind, that's a sample size of 2.
len
From: Vladimir Gapeyev [mailto:vgapeyev@seas.upenn.edu]
On Thu, 18 Aug 2005, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
> There are more failures from the self-constituted groups of amateur
> standards writers than there are successes. You are going to quote back
> to me the few notable successes from the amateurs but they are fewer
> than their counterparts. Don't confuse myth for math.
I presume hard numbers are what tells apart myth from math. Are there any
numbers to back up this claim? (That's a question out of genuine -- even
though amateur -- interest, really!)
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