[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: W3C Culture and Aims (Was: What does SOAP really add?)
From: <jwrobie@m...> > Quite simply, small development groups are more productive than large > groups. I don't know that productivity is the most important criterion. When people owe their livilihoods to a specification, it should be maintained in a public and open process with some combination of ombudsman, special-interest protectors and democacy, not by secret enclave. Maintanance of a standard is not a papal election. Take the case of XML 1.0. There was a large semi-public group (of over 100 people?) which nutted through most issues, then a smaller group (10 or so) which figured out what the consensus/outcome/implementation of the larger group's debate was, then a smaller group (the editors, two or three) who figure out what the consensus/outcome/implementation/wording of the working group was, then finally the W3C director (who was available to toss the coin if people could not get consensus on an isue that needed to be decided, and to confirm that procedure had been followed and that the thing seemed to fit in with the rest of the Web.) The largest group represented in turn the opinions and expertise of many more. So XML is an example of outside-in standards development. Lets look at XML 1.1 in contrast. There we have inaccessible discussions by a tiny group on something that impacts a lot of people. There is no mechanism to try to ascertain even basic questions such as "Is an XML 1.1 acceptable, or should we go to XML 2.0". XML Schemas is similar. There are certainly attempts to get feedback, and having regular staged public drafts helps prevent the misconceptions that would arise from peicemeal presentation of changes. But if all WG discussion were made publicly readable (except on issues relating to disclosure of IPR) how could the final spec be worse. To the contrary, people would understand it more, real deficiencies in approach would have beed discovered earlier, and there is more of a chance that the big questions (such as "what is a markup language?" and "should XML be a format which can be used to serialize any database data including null characters and null values?") would have to be answered, resulting in more cohesive architectures rather than the current situation where we have streams of individual artifacts based on decisions we don't know the basis or consistency of. Cheers Rick Jelliffe
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