Put another way, I guess:

the W3C is just that, a consortium consisting of and existing at the sufferance 
of large and well-healed corporations who, as much as anything, wish to be seen 
to be participating in a 'standardization' effort. Consequently, W3C is not 
particularly well structured or mandated to collect and reflect the desires or 
even needs of customers. i.e., the members of this list. I assume each of the 
consortium members has a function that it thinks well able to assess customer 
need. Some may think they are well equipped to *shape* customer need...or at 
any rate tell customers what they want. This is the true meaning of "embrace 
and expand".  :-)


"Simon St.Laurent" wrote:
>
> Which, of course, raises the question of why people who are locked out of
> the discussions should be inclined to have much faith in the decisions
> arrived at in those discussions.

"Paul Prescod replied"
Users ceded control of their standards from organizations they could
control -- such as the IETF and ISO -- to organizations that they could
not -- such as the W3C. Users confer legitimacy just on standards
organizations just as they do on governments. Presumably, they trust these
organizations.

Luckily, a determined and interested group of users can make their own
standards: we've already seen that with SGML (ISO) and WebDAV (IETF) and
even XML-DEV (SAX). The only problem is that more advanced standards are
incredibly expensive to create.



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