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Re: You call that a standard?

• To: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• Subject: Re: You call that a standard?
• From: Alaric B Snell <alaric@a...>
• Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2004 18:33:02 +0100
• Cc: 'Rich Salz' <rsalz@d...>, xml-dev <xml-dev@l...>
• In-reply-to: <15725CF6AFE2F34DB8A5B4770B7334EE03F9F711@h...>
• References: <15725CF6AFE2F34DB8A5B4770B7334EE03F9F711@h...>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030704 Debian/1.4-1

Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
> ISO is political.  Extremely.  They are also 
> process-bound which makes them reliable and 
> predictable.  They admit the existence of politics 
> and plan for it.  Process isn't evil; it is the 
> buffer against it.  It doesn't always work 
> but overrunning a buffer to achieve a malicious 
> result is something of an art form, yes?

I'm reminded of the reason why OIDs - what ASN.1 uses for namespace 
identifiers, more or less - are numeric, with optional textual labels 
that are just like comments when the OID is written to make it more 
readable; they're numeric so they don't need to be changed when 
organisations get renamed, take each other over, etc.

So identifiers based on an OID assigned to, say, a despotic and horrible 
government that executes millions of people, can still be used. Whereas 
a namespace URI that began 
"http://xml-effort.evil-secret-police.gov.XX/", where .XX is some 
country, might have longevity issues.

ABS

• References:
  • RE: You call that a standard?
    • From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>

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