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Re: Hobbsian processes

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: Hobbsian processes
• From: Mike Champion <mc@x...>
• Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2002 11:35:56 -0400
• In-reply-to: <200208231540.27845.miles@m...>

8/23/2002 10:40:27 AM, Miles Sabin <miles@m...> wrote:


>All in all, I think the costs of standardization have been wildly 
>underestimated.

I'm afraid I agree.

Think of all the energy we as geeks invest in the infrastructure
standards analyses/disputes: REST vs RPC, Topic Maps vs RDF, 
W3C Schema Definition Language vs RELAX NG, DTDs vs any flavor
of schemas, URIs vs URLs.  Most end users probably think of these as
boring mechanical things that it should be possible to sort
out by locking some geeks up in a room until they agree.  
Real-world industry standards have to deal with tangible economic
costs and benefit considerations with bean counters and marketing
weasels looking over their shoulders.  

Not to mention intra-agency bureaucratic politics; think of the American FBI
and CIA worrying more about each other than al Quaeda, and then
tell me that rational people should be able to sit down together
and leverage XML technology to get their systems to interoperate
via authoritative standards! 

My very limited experience with a vertical industry standards
organization left me with the impression that the W3C is 
a paragon of rational efficiency by comparison.

• References:
  • Re: Hobbsian processes
    • From: Miles Sabin <miles@m...>

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