[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: You call that a standard?
One point that might differentiate standard from specification. A standard is like a street light. Everyone uses it, recognizes it, and is made better off by it as opposed to other alternatives. Or the electric wall socket and its matching plug, or clothes in the form of shirt and pants and shoes, or doors in standard sizes and or windows in standard sizes. Standard implies universal distribution, universal acceptance, universal adoption. In order for a componet of our society to meet the rigours of standard, it must be open source, easily adpatable, by all with the need, to the circumstances of its use in such a way that its utility out weighs the benefit of any other alternative. An implementation of specification or a set of specifications may eventually become standards. The wide free distribution of the netscape browser was designed to transition a specfication into a standard. A possible subset of a universal standard as described above might be vendor specific specification which one or a few vendors agree to adopt, but that does not make it a universal standard. Anything short of universally distributed, understood and adopted would seem to be short of the utility that constitutes a standard. Or said differently, to be a standard, the utility element must be univeral. sterling On Wed, 28 Apr 2004, Dare Obasanjo wrote: > Nope, what you've described is a specification. Anyone can slap a document with some rules in it one the Web. Does that make it a standard? I designed a query language for XML when I was in college and you can read the description at http://www.xmldb.org/sixdml/sixdml-lang.html/. By your definition, it is a standard. To me that is worse than meaningless. It is meaninglessness masquerading as being meaningful. > >
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