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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Anti-Ranti
 > Matthew Gertner wrote: > I've placed a new rant on our website.... > Any and all comments and (especially) criticism would be most welcome. You write "There is broad concensus in the XML development community that W3C must change.." and this is where I think you go astray. Most XML developers are not on XML-DEV, they don't have time or inclination to participate, they don't make it to conferences. Perhaps they don't live in the US anyway...indeed, they might be suspicious of any "democratic" efforts which replace a far-off institution which can be pressured with just another mob of loud Americans. There is no broad concensus; people don't care because they could nor participate anyway. When did we vote; when did you take a poll; how did you track everyone down? There is plenty of agitation from people who feel left out or who are professional journalists interested in whipping up a story (which is not to say that they are not also developers with a legitimate point of view, and valued members of the "XML development community", nor that it is not good to review important issues). Why not? All part of the game. But strong feelings by some does not constitute a groundswell. Look at SML-DEV--everyone is bending over backwards to give them time to talk at conferences, but it is only a handful of excited people: look at SML-DEV and you see maybe 6 names do 95% of posts. The number one issue for democratization of the WWW is how to accomodate input from members of cultures which are based on discretion, deferring to those you respect even when they are wrong, and politely waiting to be asked for an opinion at an appropriate time. And its not just other cultures. Why are there no women participating in XML-DEV? The only women whose names I have seen in the XML forums have either come in from the SGML world (because women are very active at all levels of the publishing industry) or are involved with W3C. Occassionally a woman pops her head up and asks a question, but clearly XML-DEV is not a forum which many women feel inclined to participate on. If anyone is thinking about opening up standards-making, I would like to know by what process they will make sure that women are attracted rather than repelled? As an assertive, Western, white, English-speaking male on a forum largely made from the same, it seems strange to hear what seems to be complaints against W3C/ISO which, however unsatisfactorily, provide the only forums I have seen which have significant representation from people who are less assertive, less Western, less white, less English-speaking and less male than me. Accomodating outsiders requires * some forums should be moderated by someone respected and responsible, to prevent monopolization by loudmouths, dirty hippies, slick company men, and any other troulesome stereotypes; * decent time intervals between when proposals are made and when they are decided, to allow consideration by people for whom English is not their first language (and, please note, that the "legalese" of standards may be much easier to understand by a technical non-native speaker than many of the postings on XML-DEV! Indeed, anyone who complains about legalese should refrain from mentioning any "design patterns" in their postings--all jargon is mystifying and irritating to outsiders); * fairly cohesive point-releases of working drafts, not day-to-day releases; too little time between releases means that there will be not enough time for people to formulate an opinion and the releases will not be choseive, but too much time between releases means that many comments may be obsolete (given that most obvious problems that external reviewer finds will also be found by an internal reviewer); * reliance on internet technology which does not require people meet at a particular place or time; * the support of competing specifications: which is better Schema language?--DTDs from ISO which attempt to be a 80:20 solution but many people think are too small because of the lack of datatyping; RELAX from Japan which takes modularization and ad hoc schema composition as the central problem; DSD from Europe which takes CSS as a good role model; XML Schemas from US and UK which says that the central issue is supporting type derivation to allow meaningful local names for standard types; or Schematron from Taiwan which says all the others are just minor variations on an uninteresting and hard-to-implement theme (Xerces Schema support takes over 30000 lines of Java, Schematron takes a couple of hundred!). It is this last point which, I think, is the most important. And that is where, to me, many of the people against W3C fall into the exactly the same boat as the W3C. The issue is whether competition and plurality and diversity is good or bad. Look at a lot of the rhetoric about SML--it is not just that XML has been made with certain tradeoffs, they say that XML is positively wrong-headed for not having been constructed on minimalist principles. Look at the discussion on "why do we need XSL when CSS or Java is good enough?", and before that to "XML Schemas should replace DTDs" and before that to "XML will kill SGML". In all cases, there is a certain mindset or personality involved which says not "let the market decide" but "plurality is bad". The Internet has thrived on supporting plurality: each layer of the network allows multiple higher layers to declare themselves. URLs start with a method. HTTP data gives a mime type. XML documents have a style-sheet PI. We can choose SAX or DOM. We can choose particular SAX or DOM implementations. The way to make W3C open is not to enforce some particular organizational strategy on them, it is to make sure that all technology they (and we) create allows * plurality at the next-higher level; * does not block out competition at its own level; * is specified tightly enough that it can prevent snraling monolopies from creating incompatible versions--ultimately this can only be done by a branding and testing program. In other words, if Tim B-L wants to start up a consortium with enough clout to get the big players to co-operate more, more power to him. And if other people who like the particular technology that results, let them develop their own: I have been the longest-running and most vocal critic of the various schema proposals that have come out, but I backed that up by actually having some technology to contribute rather than just talk. The way to support democratization is to allow encourage plural development of stadards. There is no reason why, for any problem, there is one best solution. Certainly there is little reason to have confidence that we can know it beforehand. Let a thousand flowers blossom, and a hundred schools of thought contend. Don't jump on W3C for being closed, jump on anyone who says "all technology *should* be constructed along the lines of principle X" or "everyone should use technolgy Y, so we don't need/want to support anything else". (I think Murata-san's comments about RELAX's future are really good in this regard...oops earthquake...back again...for any who has read them.) They are the real conspiracy. How do we support respect-based cultures? Respect and allow independent development and contribution from people in other places and times and languages and economic circumstances. Clearly distinguish, for each technology, the mechanism for invoking from the mechanism from performing the action, and allow the mechanism for invoking to support plurality. Tangentially, this is also why I, apparantly alone in the world, think that PIs are so important--they are the only thing that are utterly outside the control of the standardizers who dislike plurality (which often, in a very human fashion, is just that they want to promote their hard-fought-for technology and they genuinely don't agree with the other team's technology). No matter how tight someone makes a schema, I can still put in legitimate markup which allows me to invoke my own processing, and make that an integral part of the document. Getting rid of them (without making some replacement, such as a convention that you can always add elements or attributes from other namespaces and that no schema language should enforce otherwise--impractical) plays into the hands of the embrace-and-extenders. The W3C is not the enemy: perhaps *ML-DEV is! Rick Jelliffe Taiwan (Not speaking on behalf of any employer.) *************************************************************************** This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers. To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@x...&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ *************************************************************************** 
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