W3C Successes (RE: [xml-dev] W3C Culture and Aims )

4/22/2002 7:59:13 PM, <> wrote:

>I do think that the W3C has had some pretty big
>successes, including HTML and XML.

Hmm, the last of these was more than four years ago.  And both of them resulted from the 
W3C's  "old" role as a place where vendors can come together to define interoperability 
profiles of  reasonably well-understood technologies.  That is clearly not what the Schema, 
Query, or Semantic  Web working groups are doing.  "Purely academic" is not a reasonable 
description for the W3C's focus these days, but neither is a desciption that does not reflect 
its newer aspirations to push the boundaries of Web/XML technology.