I see an opportunity for an interesting "social aspects of
technology" research project: asses attributes for a large range
of standards (size, completeness, precision, domain covered,
etc.), assess the adoption success of the standard (number of
implementations, ease of interoperability, perception of success
/ failure by community, etc.) and see how the two correlate.
Should at least be worth a PhD ....
There are two quite different issues?
What is the best size and layering etc for a standard
technology; and what is the best for the standard document?
(People all the time conflate the technology with the document
IMHO.)
(But you would expect the size of the standard
document would to some extent need to reflect the size of the
techology. )
But apart from that everything will have its own
rules: looking for general principles is well and fine as long
as the abstraction doesnt then become unprovable dogma that
prevents advance.
Actually i think xml/xpath might be quite rare in
having the standards document lead the technology, rather than
being a QA on the technology being pushed or instigated by
vendors and dictators-for-life.
I dont think it is necessarily a bad thing if a
standard has known gaps or clear limitations or TBDs. Should ODF
have been held up until it had a spreadsheet formula language?
Of course not.
But if a formal standard process is above all a QA on
the documentation for a technology, what it would bring to JSON
is not necessarily fixes for the edge-case problems, or the
addition of comments, even though committees love tinkering, but
we might expect it should be a clearer list of those edgecases
and short comings, and standard ways to ameliorate them.
Regards
Rick
