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RE: Lotsa laughs

• From: "Didier PH Martin" <martind@n...>
• To: "'XML Dev'" <xml-dev@i...>
• Date: Tue, 25 May 1999 11:48:35 -0400

Hi Chris,

Thanks for giving more info about W3C composition. You stated that w3c makes
specs and this is right but a lot of people treats this as "standard".

You also said that some of these specs are brought to ISO for
standardization. Good, more of them should follow the same path ;-)

It seems that we need more and more a good map of different "standard"
institutions and be careful of where we put the tag "standard" and what's
behind this word.

you said:
> I don't think it is fair to say that no Americans can help produce
> internationalised specifications. People like Francois Yergeau, Glenn
> Adams and Gavin Nicol (three of the four authors of RFC2070,
> "Internationalization of the HyperText Markup Language") are all based
> in the Americas (USA and Canada). [The fourth author was Martin Durst,
> who is Swiss and works for W3C, out of the Japanese host institution.]

reply:
I understand your point but isn't RFC2070 under IETF?

Didier said:
> d) ISO is an international organism with representative from different
> countries. But ISO weight seems to be less and less significant.

Chris said:
> ISO represents governments, not the international community at large.
> For example. Tibetan is a language, but was not added into ISO 10646
> because Tibet is ruled by China. Only when the Unicode consortium became
> involved were the characters needed for non-governmental scripts added.
> (By way of an example).

> I don't think ISO is insignificant, but it does seem to work best when
> taking existing well implemented specifications and performing editorial
> clarifications rather than de-novo technical work.

reply:
Thank for the precision. You are very right on this. ISO represent
governments not necessarily communities or conquered countries. I also agree
on ISO Speed of action (very slow). We also tend to forget ( the public)
what ISO is and what the word "standard" means, or what behind a word like
"standard" :-)

So, with this perpective should we say that instead of talking of "standard"
for a lot of actual technologies we should instead talk of "proposal" or
"recommendations"?

Thanks Chris for bringing more info on what's behind W3C.

regards
Didier PH Martin
mailto:martind@n...
http://www.netfolder.com


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