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Re: W3C Successes (RE: W3C Culture and Aims )

• To: Paul Prescod <paul@p...>,Dare Obasanjo <dareo@m...>,xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: W3C Successes (RE: W3C Culture and Aims )
• From: Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@d...>
• Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2002 08:58:28 -0400
• In-reply-to: <3CC836E1.F30E86ED@p...>
• References: <8BD7226E07DDFF49AF5EF4030ACE0B7E05573CDD@r...>

At 10:03 AM 4/25/2002 -0700, Paul Prescod wrote:
>Okay, but let's acknowledge market realities: as we've seen many times,
>when the standards body refuses to take the lead, vendors do. And what
>happens is that industry's technologies become "de facto standards."
>This puts "leading vendors" in a position to use their power to redirect
>the standards landscape unilaterally.

Bingo.

Worse yet, if two or more of these vendors try to agree on one way of doing 
things, it can be seen as collusion by the Justice Department, and the 
companies can be sued for trying to cooperate. This is why the HTML browser 
vendors were so keen to have a body to oversee their cooperation, and it's 
an important factor in most W3C Working Groups.

One might argue that W3C recommendations should be treated as openly agreed 
industry standards. One might also argue that there should be some way to 
decide which standards still matter in five years, clean them up, and do 
the boring standards work Mike prefers at that point.

Jonathan

• References:
  • RE: W3C Successes (RE: W3C Culture and Aims )
    • From: "Dare Obasanjo" <dareo@m...>
  • Re: W3C Successes (RE: W3C Culture and Aims )
    • From: Paul Prescod <paul@p...>

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