[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: The truth about standards...
Well David, you don't spend much time working contracts and proposals, I guess. Policy makes a big difference there. They call it process; you call it poison, but effectively, without it, there is no accountability or traceability, and in the big game, without these, watch your tax shekels go down rat holes (why states have competitive bid laws, sunshine laws, and so on). So sure, it is what people do that matters, and given a lack of understanding, they follow policy. In the case of SAX, it mattered a lot that the technology be there for certain problems. Now MS has a different event-based parser that isn't SAX. In this case, since SAX isn't a standard under any of the cited organizations, I guess it makes no difference, but were it, some procurements would be forced out of using what would be called proprietary alternatives irrespective of applicability or costs. These aren't black or white engineering decisions. That would be nice but naive. len From: David Megginson [mailto:david@m...] Bullard, Claude L (Len) writes: > I interpret it to favor the W3C specifications even if they are > works in progress over other standards organization works even if > these are complete. That eliminates competitors if there is a W3C > candidate. > So we aren't to compare the relative merits of each but take the > W3C uber alles. That's bad policy. [snip] Now, now, Len -- I'm not sure it's that bad. As you have pointed out many times, what matters is what people actually do, not what spec writers invent or marketing departments announce support for. Initially no one made a big deal of announcing their support for SAX or RSS -- they just quietly used them. It was a decision made on the engineering level rather than the management level, so it actually mattered (and tended to solve real problems rather than hypothetical ones). Ditto for HTML in the early (pre-1994) days and TCP/IP even earlier. > They do need to clarify and they do need to understand that some > technologies will have better alternatives for some cases. RELAXNG > is probably the star case for that. If there is a real and pressing engineering problem that schemas solve, then the winner will be a spec that solves the problem (not necessarily the best one, but still one that works); if there's not a real and pressing engineering problem, then the spec with the best marketing will win automatically, but in that case, who cares?
|
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
|