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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] =?UTF-8?Q?Which_Will_Be_Released_First,_th?==?UTF-8?Q?e_W3C=E2=80=99s_XQ
 The following is from my blog entry: http://donxml.com/allthingstechie/archive/2004/10/13/1421.aspx Microsoft has been taking in on the chin recently for the delays in releasing Longhorn (including from yours truly), but I'd like to point out another 800lb gorilla that should be taken to task for taking too long to release a product, the W3C. Some people love to bash Microsoft, and typically the same folks look the other way when the W3C does something similar. In case you haven't heard, Dare announced that XQuery will not be a part of the .Net 2.0 beta 2 release (and the final release). The reason, the estimated time that the XQuery spec will become a recommendation isn't until late 2005, which is after .Net 2.0 will be released. Microsoft got burned badly when they released code based on working drafts of XSL back in IE 5.0, and they can't let that happen again. In case you don't remember, XSL looked like it was ready to go, and very late in the game the W3C members decided to rewrite the spec and split it into two (XSLT and XSL-FO). I spent years on the VBXML XSLT discussion group trying to explain to developers that there were 2 versions of XSL out there, and it was very confusing for the majority of developers. So, Microsoft has decided to be cautious and limit their exposure on XQuery and have limited support within SQL Server 2005. I don't blame them on this. The XQuery spec has been an official W3C Working Draft since February 2001 and is still a Working Draft (over 3 years later). It still has to go thru the complete process (Working Draft to Candidate Recommendation to Proposed Recommendation and finally W3C Recommendation). I don't think it would be beyond some of the business on the committee to purposely slow down the recommendation process in order to give their companies time to catch up to level of support Microsoft has for XQuery. So which one do you think will be released first Longhorn or the W3C's XQuery spec? One of my major complaints with the W3C (and other standards organizations) is that they just produce standards, not implementations of the standards. I understand that software companies have a vested interest in releasing products according to a specification, but without having a publicly accessible implementation of the spec to work with during the draft process it makes it very difficult to create test cases. The writers of the spec have to resort to thought exercises to test their ideas. My idea is to marry a standards organization with an open source community (think of merging the W3C and SourceForge), but put a hard division between the two groups. In order to prevent intellectual property leakage from the businesses on the standards org side to the open source side, individuals from one side can not work on the other (for a given spec). This way there is a living example for the standards group to work the bugs out of (before it becomes a recommendation), and should streamline the specification process. I know licensing can become a hairy issue here, so that is why I keep the 2 sides divided. A company on the standards committee does not risk exposing its IP to the open source implementation, and the reverse should be true too. To make this work, the open source project leaders would need to have very good access to the working draft committee. In a perfect world, there would be at least 2 open source implementations (.Net and Java), and even the code based on rejected implementations would be available for all (which is something some of the MS MVPs in XML have been asking of MS for libraries that were abandoned). Don Demsak 
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