[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: W3C's 'Moral Majesty'
Rick Jelliffe writes: > There are four approaches: > * "that is the way of the word": it cannot be helped; > * positive discrimination, e.g. subsidies; > * reduce the reliance on face-to-face meetings; > * universal enfranchisement. The third is by far the best solution. Face-to-face meetings are generally more useful for working out political problems than they are for technical problems, precisely they tend to make it even easier for a minority of fast-thinkers and loud talkers (like me) to dominate the discussion: often the best ideas come from quiet, thoughtful people who need to mull over a new idea for a couple of hours (or days) before stating an opinion. Business and technical people used to need a lot of face-to-face contact, but there is a new generation (the under 45's) that's very comfortable with e-mail and telecommuting, and e-mail is a great equalizer -- you can pick up mail for a whole group of people just by setting up an old 286 to dial a local ISP once a day (of course, many people in the world don't have electricity or phone, much less an old 286, but at least the circle is a little wider). As a case in point, SAX 1.0 was designed and implemented on XML-Dev in a few weeks without a single F2F meeting. > Of course, there are other big blocks, notably the reliance on text > rather than diagrams in W3C specifications, and indeed the fact that > English is the only language. The reliance on text is important for accessibility -- both visually-impaired people can have text read to them by software, while hearing-impaired people can read it; diagrams don't work as nicely. The reliance on English is more of a problem. All the best, David -- David Megginson david@m... http://www.megginson.com/ 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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