[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: W3C Rants (was: RE: W3C as Golden Goose ...)
Precisely. And now that resources may become less profligate (After The Gold Rush - Neil Young) and we are back to farming and cattle rustling .... err .. ranching, we have to pick and choose projects more carefully. RAND is a way to keep the research that corporations sponsor available as a source because corporations are going back to the old way of closing up and keeping anything patentable to themselves as long as possible. That makes weak disclosure requirements very weak. The W3C is between a rock and a hard place, but they put themselves there by submitting to the will of corporations to close up processes precisely because of the market advantage of doing so. When the W3C founders submitted to that, they were effectively captured. Some such as the XML Protocol WG understand that and it will be interesting to see if they can succeed in that environment under the rules they have set for themselves. I hope they do. Running code and all that but don't expect the network effect to come to the rescue. The web was a fast blip, but its range is known now and so is its path. It isn't that hard to stay ahead of it. Nice doggie but where is that rock... As for the Pentagon, etc., yes, I do expect them to keep on making sure these things are *invented*. DARPA is always there and that is what they do. A very large percentage of the success some want to claim for the W3C starts there not at CERN. We don't like to think about that or some think it distasteful. It is actually remarkably effective and the wise understand the relationship and use it to ensure technology serves many needs, not just the Pentagon. A more open development of application language standards is going on in OASIS and that is likely to be an area of more focus because it is by nature, share or lose. Markup has that effect and resistance to markup in many organizations, particularly their marketing groups, is strong because it does not enable domination as easily as an OCX does. But it is an irresistable force and for that, yes we can credit XML for making it a slamdunk (call the DOM anything, but it is a primary key to that success and so are schemas). Yes this is XML-Dev. Do people understand this is an OASIS list, not a W3C sponsored list? Do people know the fundamental differences in the philosophies of those who created OASIS and those who created the W3C? The differences are profound. Should all these groups work together? Well, heck yes. And RAND is part of how they will do that. Make sure it works. len -----Original Message----- From: Champion, Mike [mailto:Mike.Champion@S...] Uhh, a case could be made that XML *is* the best practices evolved from 10 years' experience with SGML. The original XML WG did a lot more than "put a stamp on it," but I'm sure this was true of the ISO technical committees that standardized screw thread specifications as well. > > To recall, the whole idea behind the W3C is exactly > to have the industry come together and share their > collective experiences and requirements from the > markets and then develop something universal based on > that. Worked pretty well so far, I'd say. I have a somewhat less romantic view of the origin of the W3C. My impression is that the the Web technology vendors were caught between a rock -- the ISO's national-level, extremely slow-moving standardization process -- and a hard place -- the IETF's individual-level organized anarchy. They needed something that operated at the vendor level, could quickly produce common Recommendations on how they could overcome the practical problems of the day, and basically to exploit the network effect so that everyone could profit rather rather continuing a lose-lose situation of fighting over which sites supported which proprietary tags. This collaboration made a world a better place, but let's not pretend that the W3C membership are a bunch of John Lennon clones sitting around in their hippie beads trying to Imagine living life in peace! The collaborative standardization of web technology worked very well for a few years, when the "internet revolution" was providing the rising tide that floated all boats, and while the intellectual capital of the academic - government - scientific internet collaboration was laying on the ground waiting to be harvested. The W3C process has bogged down very seriously in the last couple of years because of IP concerns, because the ".bomb" made the people who can actually do standards work effectively badly needed for more lucrative work (or they just plain burned out), and because the technology is getting into terra incognita. XML, XSLT, XPath and HTML were "laying around waiting to be harvested" from seeds sown by SGML, DSSSL, filesystems/string matching, and various SGML document DTDs. Technologies for typing, inheriting, querying, rendering, linking, adding semantics to syntax, etc. have to be grown from seed (or hybridized from lots of diverse sources) and it's an open question whether the W3C process will work for that.
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