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RE: strange feeling

• To: 'Arjun Ray' <aray@n...>, xml-dev@l...
• Subject: RE: strange feeling
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2002 16:24:19 -0500

From: Arjun Ray [mailto:aray@n...]

|> Jean Paoli (MS), was not part of the SGML community? 

>He was only recently MS too.  Weren't his SGML days at Grif? 

As I recall, yes.  What happened to him?  The contributor that 
I remember most vividly from MS is Andrew Layman.  Decent fellow 
and was able to steer among the Scylla of being an MS rep and 
the Charybdis of the web loathing for Redmond.  Hard job.
 
| I seem to recall that Tim stated somewhere that Jean Paoli didn't actually do 
| any editing of the XML 1.0 Recommendation, despite the claim to the contrary 
| in the document itself.

>The First Draft (Nov 96) was the stellar work of Tim and Michael Sperberg-
>McQueen (both "invited experts" rather than company reps).  Some time in
>97, Tim disclosed that he had recently agreed to be on a consulting
>retainer to Netscape.  That got his name *off* the spec - well, you figure
>out why that happened.  And what deal got his name back on again ;-)

I remember that fracas.  It was unfair to Tim in the extreme, but that 
was a political/marketing strategy and he somehow ended up in the middle. 
The guy had to make a living, for crying out loud, and LOTS of the crew 
were quickly being signed on by different companies with big options, 
incentives, etc.  I don't know a thing about the deals made.  Not being 
and inner circle guy, or a member of the W3C even, I learn from the 
lists.  I never sensed that Tim would steer things to Netscapes' 
advantage; my guess is that he was there to talk some sense to them 
after the Paris gaffes from MARCA et al.  I was trying via backchannels 
to do the same thing because I didn't want to see a browser hegemony 
emerge despite the fact I thought it the probable outcome even before 
XML got started.  My personal opinion was that MS won by being fast 
and NS lost by being dense about what markup had to offer.  I'm not 
sure the advantages of loose coupling in a hypermedia framework were 
as obvious then as they are now. The DocHeads knew it but only because 
CALS had made it obvious that heterogeneous systems are exactly that.

len

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