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RE: Will XML change the character of W3C?

• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• To: Ann Navarro <ann@w...>, karl.best@o...,xml-dev@l...
• Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2000 11:16:50 -0500

And that means this thread is clearly signal,  
and not noise or degradation.  I can't sell 
technology;  I can sell services.  I can't 
go to a dispatch center and sell them 
semantics; I can sell a means to evaluate the 
context of a call for service or a means for a 
detective to determine if a pattern of crime 
activity requires a given remediation.  

If the developer community cannot be privvy to the reason, 
political or technical, for a specification feature then 
they find their own because we do business in a domain 
of requirements for services which we meet, prove, or 
are not paid.
 
This we do or else we abandon responsibility 
to protect out customers.  If the decision is 
purely political and one does not endorse that 
polity, one must explore options and this is the 
forum in which to do that, the one in which 
if the patience and deliberation are practiced, 
some measure of understanding is found.  

So far, the process is working.  It appears that 
the term "semantic web" offers little clarity, but 
that an RDF service has the potential to improve 
resource discovery processes.  

That is a win.  How big a win, I can't 
say but now we know what to look for, what to test, 
how to proceed.  We can do this in open discussion 
without the need for leaders or followers to 
shout down the process because they are tired 
of hitting the delete key or because the 
outcome is not satisfying their polity.
 
If the universe is designing more capable 
idiots, it is at least improving the service.

Len 
http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard

Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h

From: Ann Navarro [mailto:ann@w...]

At 08:44 AM 10/19/00 -0500, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:

>We can't do it *all* on open lists.  All that people
>such as Simon St Laurent have asked for is the
>technical reasoning behind decisions.

Except that this ignores (or forgets) that all decisions aren't necessarily 
based on the best technical reasoning. It may have been politics, 
stonewalling, or finally caving in to some sort of consensus with a 
minority opinion. Rare are issues that are unanimous.

Would those who want reasons behind decisions accept "the best solution the 
group could come to consensus on"? I can only see follow-up as to what the 
other proposals were and why or why not something was/wasn't accepted, and 
that's where you get into "Well, Foo, Inc's rep refused this", etc.

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