I think the lesson is that a standard technology will ultimately die when its community fractures into groups who take a win/lose approach of cavilier veto-ing whatever they don't need: there is a Mexican standoff and stagnation. (Look at SGML in 1994, for example.)
This disinterest in the needs of others can take the forms of both minimalism ("I don't use feature X" as a justification for completely getting rid of it) and giantism ("I might need feature Z" as a justification for adding it as a required feature in the bundle some faction rams through: despite those who don't need it: XSD?)
This fracturing is almost assured as soon where the community is dominated by U.S. corporations, due to their sociopathic hyper-competitiveness: whatever advances my enemy is my enemy too.
Contrast with the win-win attitude, which allows modest evolution: it does not remove a feature without providing workable alternatives. And it does not add features which shift the complexity goalposts of the standard much (in the wrong direction.)
What happens when modest win-win change is not accomodated is that the Open Standard becomes a Closed Standard, and has the lifecycle that can entail.
By the way, my RAN language balloon (RAN now short for Rapid Access Notation) has had numerous impovements. For example, instead of needing some DTD or Schema to define that an attribute is an ID or IDREF, the attribute can be simply specified in the markup using == rather than = (to specify it is an anchor) and =# to specifiy it is an (outgoing) in-document link. (This is an example of not removing a feature (DTDs) without providing a workable alternative, b.t.w.)
Happy New Year
Rick Jelliffe
