[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Lotsa laughs
Didier PH Martin wrote: > c)W3C is a consortium of several companies and produces "standards". Generally, we claim to produce specifications. Some of thos especifications become Recommendations. Some of those Recommendations become standards (for example, the PNG Recommendation is undergoing standardisation at ISO). > However the W3C composition is mostly American. Certainly, there are a good number of American members. Taking full members, there are currently 44 from the Americas (including South America and Canada), 31 from Europe and Africa, and 14 from Asia and Pacific. Of affiliate members, there are currently 148 from the Americas, 62 from Europe and 30 from Asia and Pacific. The list of W3C members is publically available [1] The demographic seems to be that membership outside the Americas continues to increase. But equally, where are the places with free local phone calls, unmetered access to ISDN, and significant government help in establishing a network infrastructure? It is hardly more surprising then that there is much greater uptake of the Web in the USA than in, for example, France and Germany. And thus, more members of W3C. > Could we say that W3C produces international standards? Our French and Japanese host institutions and our international offices, who gather new members in their respective countries, are certainly helping to redress the balance in terms of international participation. And the Unicode consortium, with which we have close links and at whose conferences I and other W3C staff have spoken on numerous occasions, also seems to think we produce well-internationalised specifications. I don't think it is fair to say that no Americans can help produce internationalised specifications. People like Francois Yergeau, Glenn Adams and Gavin Nicol (three of the four authors of RFC2070, "Internationalization of the HyperText Markup Language") are all based in the Americas (USA and Canada). [The fourth author was Martin Durst, who is Swiss and works for W3C, out of the Japanese host institution.] > d) ISO is an international organism with representative from different > countries. But ISO weight seems to be less and less significant. ISO represents governments, not the international community at large. For example. Tibetan is a language, but was not added into ISO 10646 because Tibet is ruled by China. Only when the Unicode consortium became involved were the characters needed for non-governmental scripts added. (By way of an example). I don't think ISO is insignificant, but it does seem to work best when taking existing well implemented specifications and performing editorial clarifications rather than de-novo technical work. [1] http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List -- Chris British, based in France helping make internationalised specifications for the Web. 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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