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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: sunshine and standards development
 "Simon St.Laurent" wrote: > > Mike Champion wrote: > >In this scheme of things, the problem is that people see the W3C > >as both crafting technologies out of thin air and having their > >Recommendations treated as if they were standards. > > Exactly. The results of the 'research lab' are posted as more-or-less > final, and only in rare cases (like ISO HTML) is there another process > creating STANDARD standards on top of them. As some-one else has noted, ISO (and national standards bodies) have faced a real problem with the advent of the WWW that they funded themselves largely by publication charges. This is not a business model that can compete against WWW feebies: so future ISO standardization will tend to be for things that are not related to the web or for which there may be legal disputes or political initiatives. Furthermore ISO standardization is a guarantee that a process has been adhered to and not a guarantee the result is useful. And especially it is not a guarantee that the result is useful on the desktop. However, most people don't know how many things they use are benefits of ISO standardization (characters sets, computer keyboard positions and layouts, the meter [except in US]). OSI software has different characteristics from TCP/IP and has been very useful for the applications that need it. ISO has been a very successful standards organization. From outside North America, there will be some scepticism of IETF: they ignored the "selective ACK" problem in TCP/IP and fiddled around doing nothing for multilingual domain name service, for example. These are two very fundamental technologies of the internet, and the issues would have been addressed years ago if the disciplines of ISO or W3C were imposed. I think the better question is "how can we make standardizing or Standardizing bodies which create 20-page-spec technologies?" Vendors and implementors want to have features that fit in with their conceptions; when they get together they will compromise; the resulting specs will always tend to be larger rather than smaller. XML edition 2 has shrink because it can reference RFCs more, but in general specs will get bigger over time. Cheers Rick Jelliffe 
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