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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] W3C and 'small vendors'.
 To whom it may concern. I hope that this letter wuld not be considered abstract, because it is actualy an explanation of one particular problem and suggestion for working that problem around. I'm not blaming the W3C, I just want to make things better for all of us with pointing to some particular problem. The problem could be solved with publishing just one paper on W3C site. My letter is a request for paper : "If you have no $15K and/or you have no ability and/or need to travel across the world, but you want to provide a feedback to W3C you have the following ways to participate in the activity of W3C: ... " I would never write this letter months before, because at that point I was thinking that W3C is doing realy great and the process is reasonable and efficient ( of course, nothing is ideal, but I saw no critical problems). Our ( www.renderx.com) particular experience with W3C shows that there *is* one ( realy, I think there is just one) problem with W3C. The problem is: "W3C does not care about small vendors / independend developers, and ignoring those groups of people usualy causes significant problems on a long run". Those of you who are reading XSL mailing list may know that for last months our group ( www.renderx.com) handled a big work in the area of XSL FO WD. We are one of top experts in that particular area, because we simply wrote ( at the moment ) the strongest implementation of that standard. More. We have published the "Validating DTD" with many comments ( because such a DTD was a show-stopper for many people, including ourselvs and the only feedback from WG was "we'l include it into the next WD") ( when???). As a result some developers wrote us that "shame on W3C - you are doing their work". Unfortunately, so far we got no feedback from W3C at all. I can not count a private email : "keep posting to the XSL-list" as a reasonable feedback on our materials, because we have spend days and weeks preparing our materials. I'm not concerned too much about this particular problem ( our DTD ). Probably, with some hidden/political steps we may establish some kind of relations with XSL WG. Maybe not. Does not matter. Also, I'm *not* saying that we have something very special with XSL FO working group. I have some e-mails that show that the same situation happens with almost every group in W3C. It's easy to understand - people are bisy with their work, there are some ( unknown ) procedures for making the descisions, there is a (maybe reasonable - I don't know) 'conspiracy' angainst the outher space e t.c. Once again - I greatly respect W3C efforts and the efforts of XSL WG in particular. The April draft of XSL FOs was a *great* step. However, it is the end of September now. The problem is that if W3C will threat us the way it is now - it could be easier for us to decide at some point : "OK, we don't care about your standard stuff. We are the only one who have the working implementation and we'l add our own proprietary workarounds to the problems you are ignoring for months. Well - maybe you are not ignoring - but with zero feedback from you and our real clients who want our engine right now - it would be OK for us to start with Netscape-alike 'spacer' tags e t.c. " Again - it is not the worstest thing. The worstest thing is that it appears that *many* small vendors / intependend developers are having the same problem with W3C. I got emails from different persons and it appears that most of people who are 'outside the W3C' are having the similiar problems. For years I was thinking that damn vendors who are introducing some proprietary extensions to some standards are doing it because of some political / marketing reasons. After vain attempts to get any feedback from W3C for months, following the procedures suggested by W3C ( posting to the XSL-list is the suggested procedure, right? ) now I think that I was just naive and perhaps some marginal whoes in comp.text.xml are not actualy stupid. I think that if it will go as it is going now with W3C and 'ordinary people' outside, it would cause some vendors to start with their own 'Linux' for XML and I don't think that it will be good. If asking me personaly: "whould you like to start with "Linux for XML"?" 3 months ago: My answer would be "Of course, no. It's stupid." If asking me about the same thing today my answer would be: "Can I get your e-mail / url? Just in case." It is a sad story. If after 3 months my answer would be: "OK, let's start a mailing list on it, we have our part ready, you have your part ready, we need to hack this and that place to make it work together - let's do it right now, it'l take us forever to understand when they will come with the next version of WD, because they are silent for 2 months again". It would be the worstest possible scenario for me and W3C, because I'l start working *aganst* W3C, but not *for* W3C. Of course just one small case is nothing. What I'm saying is that the *probability* of this scenario increases every day. More and more 'ordinary people' are gaining more expertize in XML, more and more small companies are coming with 'some' implementations and the last but not the least, it appears that most of W3C memebers realy think that keeping silence makes things better, blaming the 'rest of the world' with : "hey, we are doing important things - don't bother us". After constantly receiving such answers people like Linus usualy say: "OK. If you don't care about me, I'l kill you with my implementation. It's *not* a big deal to put together a bunch of code to get my own version of UNIX - I don't have to be a *very*big*structure* to make some temporary descisions, because the task itself is *not* that complex to spend years with designing it". The biggest problem and maybe the the only reason of Lunix was that a *lot* of FreeBSD developers decided that it's not worth their time to spend their *free* efforts to support the group of persons who are simply ignoring them. I don't think that at the beginning of Linux, advicing Linus with "Just spend $15K and join our FreeBSD team" could work. We should learn from Linux. We are geting closer to the same situation. There was one letter where the man told: "Hey! Give me one million and I'l invent the better XML". I don' think it'l work. The more probable scenario is: "Hey! Just give me 5-10 teams, like renderx.com who are frustrated with W3C - constantly rejecting them - and we'l invent the lXML ( for free, like Linux was created). lXML will *not* conform to W3C specs but will *work*right*now*". It may become possible. It's not a good thing to ignore 'ordinary people'. Just imagine what may happen if the army of people who were supporting Linux would join FreeBSD community. We could definately have the best possible Free OS. Unfortunately we have what we have. The reason was: rejecting ordinary people ( like Linus ;-) who are outside the 'elite' I predict that if W3C would not care about 'ordinary people' like it *is* doing now it may result in 'Linux of XML' initiative. The descision is up to W3C. The approach: "become an expert and everything will be fine with you" does not work with our group. We *are* experts in XSL FO, but we have no time for face-to-face meetings ( however, we spend a *lot* of time writing down our suggestions) and it appears that we don't want to spend $15.000. If W3C cares about 'ordinary people' it looks reasonable to publish some FAQ for those people. If W3C does not care - it may be better to be prepared for "Linux for XML" initiative. Maybe "Linux fo XML" would not be a bad thing. I don't know. For me it could be better ( and it was possible ) to have a perfect Free UNIX, if not splitting efforts and rescources between Free BSD and Linux. BTW - many ( if not the majority ) Linux participators came from 'non-English' world. English spelling is not the most important thing when it comes to applications. It *is* when it comes to writing papers. I respect both activities greatly. Your mileage may vary. Rgds.Paul. PS. My idea was not to start a discussion, because actualy there is nothing to discuss in my letter. I just told about my experience with W3C. I am an example of 'ordinary person' who has not enough time for politics, travel e t.c. because I need to write code. Actualy, this posting appears to be my last posting to this list, because I need to write a *lot* of code next 2 weeks. I came to the XML world in a hope to make things better. I tried hardly to prepare reasonable materials ( if you'l look at the comments to our DTD, you may understand what do I mean), instead of spending too much time on writing abstract things in mailing lists ( even I did posted some abstract things, but most of materials were not abstract ). Most of things have been ignored by W3C. However, the same things were greatly appreciated by 'ordinary people'. Also I had a chance to compare the efficiency of my working group with the efficiency of W3C working group, but it is another story. I consider our story to be the prefect experiment with W3C and 'ordinary person' . The experiment took more than 4 months. I already got some understanding and it would help me with planning my future steps. Now I'm providing W3C with the results of my experiment it hope that it would be useful for W3C. It is the only purpose of my letter. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= paul@p... www.renderx.com www.pault.com XMLTube * Perl/JavaConnector * PerlApplicationServer =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...) 
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