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On Fri, Aug 19, 2005 at 07:28:14PM +1000, Rick Jelliffe wrote:
> You would either finish within the two-year deadline, or you would never
> finish at all.
Under this rule XML would not have reached Recommendation status.
Neither would HTML at IETF, nor at W3C. Nor would DOM, nor SGML at
ISO...
As I see it, W3C XML Schema represents the result of people from
very diverse backgrounds agreeing on a set of features they could
all live with. The cost of wide adoption is often extra features.
There are extra features in XML that were there because some group
or groups couldn't live without them (e.g. public identifiers).
The standards process isn't about technical excellence. It's about
getting things to work together by having as many communities as
possible agree to adopt the specification. Of course, this doesn't
mean we *want* specs to look ugly, and the specification does need
to be implementable!
There have been a number of changes within W3C to try and help
improve interoperability of our specs in the future, including
raising the "two implementations" bar and being more visible
about the way we require specs to go through a series of public
reviews.
Liam
--
Liam Quin, W3C XML Activity Lead, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/
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