[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: W3C's 'Moral Majesty'
[Tim Berners-Lee:] > It is not a question of membership in W3C - as there is a way (as > you found) for non-members to come to meetings as invited experts - > the criterion is commitment of effort and acceptance of the charter. No, these are not the governing criteria, as you of all people know best, Tim. The actual criterion on which invitations are based is whether or not you're invited. No number of requests to be invited, presentations of credentials, commitments of effort, or acceptances of a charter can overcome the problem of not being invited. Today, the W3C process is not an open process, and it's not a system that ordinary people can get involved in and "change from within". The W3C process is the (rather unwieldy) tool of the dominant software vendors, balanced against the flawed personal vision and absolute veto power of its Director, a single human being named Tim Berners-Lee. The institutional structure of the W3C was not designed to serve the public interest, and even the most cursory analysis reveals that there is little reason to expect it to create standards that are optimized for serving the public interest. Everyone involved primarily serves special interests, and the public is neither invited nor involved in any meaningfully institutionalized fashion. The W3C is a software vendor consortium; people (including W3C members) who believe otherwise are deluding themselves. With the exception of XML 1.0 (which itself is rapidly being subverted via XML Namespaces, etc.), W3C standards always leave room for the products of software vendors to become indispensable to the usefulness of particular pieces of information. The idea that the role of software is the central organizing feature of information interchange standards is contrary to the public interest. Software is ephemeral, while information is eternal. Everyone owns information, while only software vendors own software. The idea of polluting all information with names from namespaces whose semantics and syntactic constraints are expressed by the behavior of a particular hunk of software is an idea that is consistent with the welfare of software vendors. It is not consistent with the welfare of information owners; they won't be able to buy software from the lowest bidder. The public consists of information owners, not software vendors. -Steve -- Steven R. Newcomb, President, TechnoTeacher, Inc. srn@t... http://www.techno.com ftp.techno.com voice: +1 972 231 4098 fax +1 972 994 0087 pager (150 characters max): srn-page@t... 3615 Tanner Lane Richardson, Texas 75082-2618 USA 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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