Re: [xml-dev] Re: {Loony speculation?} Re: [xml-dev] Does the W3Callow "

[adasal <adam.saltiel@gmail.com>]

This is a very thoughtful series of comments from Rick.

I'm just going to highlight from one quote

> Well, the ISO/IEC view of a standard is certainly that it is primarily an "agreement."
> This clearly resonates with some (me) more than others. In contrast, one of the most extreme views
> (and repellent) I have read about standards was a US corporate representative who wrote
> that standards are about "picking winners": spot the triumphalist worldview there!

the obvious. That people have different roles in relation to these issues. Picking winners is important to everyone from the mundane, these are the standards (and associated projects) that gain traction and visibility to the inevitable, there is power (access to resources) being brokered here.
Rick has stepped back and brought in the possibility of cultural influence on how various parties go about their business.
However, I would have thought that the prevalent and fundamental influence would be the legal conditions for business. These vary from place to place and whether the context is local, by-party or international.
I should think that other factors, such as the standing of academic institutions within a country or the standing of WWW or any other standards board would be secondary to this because specs are rules that are taken up in implementations, reference or not.

(Funnily enough, I just had to break off writing this while we discussed an in house reference implementation. A discussion of detail not intent, though.)

Best,

Adam

On 27 November 2010 03:55, rjelliffe <rjelliffe@allette.com.au> wrote:

On Fri, 26 Nov 2010 08:59:30 +0000, Stephen Green <stephengreenubl@gmail.com> wrote:

True. But what about the 'ecumenical movement' to allow the respective
bodies to work together and their products to be aligned? "Surely" they
are meant to move towards greater unity aren't they.

Well, the ISO/IEC view of a standard is certainly that it is primarily an "agreement."
This clearly resonates with some (me) more than others. In contrast, one of the most extreme views
(and repellent) I have read about standards was a US corporate representative who wrote
that standards are about "picking winners": spot the triumphalist worldview there!

It also opens the question of how regional standards bodies need can make standards
workable within their cultures and laws, and indeed I suspect that one
of the benefits of this kind of localization or acculturation could be to make us
all richer as the approaches trickle between countries: just as many countries now
have Ombudsmen even though it was not part of our cultures (or had been lost.)

For example, I associate Islamic law with a strong emphasis on supporting
bargaining and mediation(1) and I wonder whether, for example,
the XML DTD validation that returns merely "valid" or "invalid" (which may be too doltishly
extreme to be much use, but congenial to people with a "guilty/not-guilty" mindset)
--rather than, say, "almost right" or "needs rework"-- was a product of the original
personalities that put the SGML standard together originally: the contractual capability
was supported better than than the reporting capability.

That would be helped
if some of the minimalist 'surely's can be agreed and that seems to be
happening with shared concepts of 'conformance clause', 'implementation',
'normative', keyword alignment ('MUST' = <bold>'shall'</bold>, etc) and now

I associate two rather different views with "ecumenical". One is the view
that we need to agree on fundamentals and agree to disagree on or discard non-fundamentals
(a "Fundamentalist" view). The development at OASIS of the CALS Exchange
Table Model is a good example of fundamentalism in the standards world.

The other is a Catholic view, that "Truth is Symphonic" (2): that our different approaches
make us richer and we need to support them. The focus on seeing what is good in what
is different and what collective arises, rather than on paring truth to its dry bones.
I'd see the ordered pluralism supported by TCP/IP, MIME and XML as this kind of mindset
in the secular standards world. This view also emphasizes the need for active
participation in standards making, not passive disinterest that others will
do the work for you. Support for organic plurality and the need for
participation are certainly part of my prism!

(I apologize to XML-DEVers who may think this is too far from technology, but I think
it is intrinsic to standards questions like why some people or bodies want
reference implementations and others don't. The pluralistic view would be that there
should be a variety of standards groups with different rules in this regard, I guess.)


Cheers
Rick Jelliffe

1)
http://businessconflictmanagement.com/blog/2009/12/muslim-law-negotiation-and-mediation-in-a-different-context/
2) http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=3203

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