[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Standards (yet again) was RE: Use of XML ?
Yes. And by attaching an undefined mojo quality to the word "standard", we leave the world of agreements and enter the world of voodoo. Reserving that term for governments as customers to standards bodies ensures a limited applicability and enables technical innovation and incubation to proceed at the faster rate according to its own local potentials. Specification, recommendation, etc. work just fine. Perhaps the real issue is improving the quality of these documents and paying attention to alliances with the testing bodies. NIST provides such services for specs and standards, for examples. As I said to Nicholas, only practice improves the art of agreement and nothing in that world is a safety net. If people want safety nets, specs and standards have to be defined by clear processes, they must be detailed, they cannot be simply simple or minimal; they must say what they do and do not provide. The nick is that it takes incredible amounts of work to do that sort of authoring and it is tough to sustain it past the initial phases in unfunded efforts unless the payoff is large and distributed. At that point, you may as well work with ISO and NIST, or better yet, let the systems work as they do now and respect the standards bodies instead of beating on them because your heros did. If it weren't for supervillains, the Justice League would have tried to rule the world for lack of anything better to do with their superpowers. Superboredom is a bad mood looking for good one. Len Brainiac II http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti. Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h -----Original Message----- From: Edd Dumbill [mailto:edd@u...] A key factor for me is the terms under which parties can participate. In our particular corner of the industry, I believe that the word "standard" comes with an implied prefix of "open." I'm not a fan of self-proclaimed standards, and I will stick to the old fashioned (how quickly things change) view that the phrase "W3C Recommendation" is still just that. I also do not believe that standard status alone imputes merit, nor that bodies such as the W3C should be sole custodian of innovation.
|
PURCHASE STYLUS STUDIO ONLINE TODAY!Purchasing Stylus Studio from our online shop is Easy, Secure and Value Priced! Download The World's Best XML IDE!Accelerate XML development with our award-winning XML IDE - Download a free trial today! Subscribe in XML format
|