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RE: Keeping ISO 8879 Alive (was RE: Markup pe rspect

• To: 'Tim Bray' <tbray@t...>, Rick Jelliffe <ricko@a...>
• Subject: RE: Keeping ISO 8879 Alive (was RE: Markup pe rspective not code)
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• Date: Mon, 5 Aug 2002 11:26:31 -0500
• Cc: XML DEV <xml-dev@l...>

I voted in the last American presidential election.  
Even with the popular vote choosing otherwise, I got a President chosen by 
the Supreme Court because our system for choosing by indirect 
representation fails when the count is so even as to fall 
into statistical noise.  Now the world gets to live with that 
and the authority has a lot of clout.  Am I nervous?  Yes.

SGML loyalists may not be pointing to a better authority. 
They are saying that a higher authority may be needed.  The 
critical aspect is the polity.   One can say that the American 
Supreme Court didn't choose well, but not that in that situation, 
by design, they were the highest authority available.

That doesn't stop me from being nervous.  Nerves are relative 
to risks of the consequences of bad choices.  Plugging an 
American razor into a European plug without an adapter has 
risks I am told, but passing a Looney south of the Falls 
is plain wrong.

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Tim Bray [mailto:tbray@t...]

Rick Jelliffe wrote:

> What purpose does ISO bashing by a TAG member serve, apart from promoting 
> factionalism? Stockholm Syndrome perhaps :-)   Tim calls a spade a spade, 
> but it is possible to have a souring experience anywhere, whenever one's particular
> use-case is not recognised as being significant by a committee interested in taking
> standards in a different direction.

Er oops sorry.  While I agree with most of what Rick says, I deny that I 
was ISO-bashing.  The two points I think I've been trying to make are

(a) SGML loyalists who trumpet its virtues on this list without any ISO 
process involvement should feel nervous
(b) Every standards organization has hits and misses, virtues and vices 
and any argument that starts with "It comes from 
{ISO/W3C/Eccma/WS-I/whatever}, so..." can be dismissed.

Hey, I plug in electrical devices and use Celsius temperatures all the 
time, a world without ISO would be unimaginable.  -Tim

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