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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: You call that a standard?
 No free lunch, here, Dare. We can split hairs on the meaning as much as we like, but I equate it with guaranteed process for this discussion. I'm well aware of the problems Bob points out in his article. Have been since before the XML oddity began. Pointed them out. Ambitions ruled anyway. Not a new thing for the mammals. Atom isn't a standard. Atom is one part of a community hijacking work done by another part and making claims. That is exactly why one doesn't do business like that if one is claiming to be 'standardizing'. I agree with the use of the term 'specification' and over the years here, have made that point repeatedly. The blogging world is still stuck in the last century playing the games that made a hash of meaningful standards work. Good product? Yes. Bad documents? Yes. Is Flash 'a standard'. Heck no. It is a ubiquitously used technology. That's cool. Like machinima, there is no substitute for Drag Drop and Go when selling product. Microsoft gets big points for understanding that "No Programming Required" is a plus to any production shop. What do customers consider standard? Well, now that is precisely the problem, isn't it? And that problem is only going to be solved when we can agree on a solution and explain it to them so that they have a conformance test for what we tell them. Microsoft is actually getting a lot smarter about this. They tell one that the XML Schemas for Office 2003 work for their products and are licensed. No pretense is made that these are standards; they are application vocabularies. My hat is off to you for that. We have two rules here: promise-control and only bid what you can demo. It has made us profitable and we sleep better. Truth is a great stress-reliever. len From: Dare Obasanjo [mailto:dareo@m...] It seems like everyone who misuses the word "standard" you are focused on the process. If you have a specification with conformance tests that was designed by committee on an open mailing list that could be subscribed to by anyone with an email address then rubberstamped with W3C/IETF/ANSI/ISO/whatever with royalty free implementation as sugar on top and...no one implements it. Then is it a standard? If I have a technology that has a single vendor but is universally accessible from multiple devices and platforms (e.g. Flash) is it a standard? Standard means whatever you want it to mean. Anyone can always complain about the process [Sam Ruby created a wiki for ATOM discussions and people complained it was too open, he started a mailing list and then people complained about backchannels] so pointing out your favorite processes doesn't guarantee that it is 'standard'. As the author of the original article wrote "I can say that my process is completely open and anyone in the world can participate. But let's schedule my meetings every quarter and once in Tokyo and once in Berlin and once in Vienna and once in Vancouver and once in Washington. Effectively only the biggest players in the world can play." Will customers consider something a standard if no one can implement the spec even if it has gone through all the right processes? Do you think the average developer thinks SQL, C++ or W3C XML Schema are standard in any meaningful sense of the word besides 'spec produced by some committee' ? Personally I use the word 'specification'. That's the only accurate description I've come across of what most people tend to claim are 'standards'. 
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