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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Will XML change the character of W3C? Was: Re: sunshine andstandard
 Here's the rub: XML Is Not a W3C Success. XML is SGML-lite. XSLT is DSSSL recast. SVG follows the same design documented years earlier by Goldfarb and Chamberlain. XML is successful because years of work in the ISO SGML world and the implementors of those systems, years of conferences and meetings were brought to fruition. HTML was a botch, Amy, a broken design that could only be fixed if the rigor of full markup was brought to bear and that couldn't be done by the working groups that created HTML. Internet time had nothing to do with it. Internet mail lists did. The only difference was moving the management focus and applying hyper-hype to the results for which some penalties have been exacted. It took both ISO experts and W3C experts and invited experts to put XML out into the world. It took volunteers, cooperation, and grit. It wasn't pleasant. It was necessary. It is the success of bridging the polities and getting them to agree. Len http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti. Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h -----Original Message----- From: Amy Lewis [mailto:amyzing@t...] Sent: Saturday, October 14, 2000 7:34 PM To: xml-dev@l... Subject: Will XML change the character of W3C? Was: Re: sunshine and standards development I've been following this debate with interest, and with, perhaps, more sympathy towards Simon's point of view than most of the posters in this thread appear to have; I'm uncomfortable with the closed nature of W3C's specification-development efforts. I tend to compare this with the IETF process, which (like W3C) produces non "standard" standards, distributes those standards for free, and uses the rule of implementation as the major benchmark for acceptance (more so than W3C, in fact). It's possible, I think, to say that one of the distinctions is that everyone on an IETF committee is an "invited expert," meaning that large companies don't get representation for a fee, and the inevitable barrier to entry is there one of skill, not of choice of employer (this is not to say that anyone sponsored by a member org is necessarily less skilled, mind). On Sat, Oct 14, 2000 at 06:56:47PM -0400, 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. But this is the IETF model, and you really ought to blame them for this "confusion" of development with standardization. Only I don't think that the confusion is avoidable: when you're dealing with the network (either with the protocols, or as with W3C, with data transfer and application presentation standards), you *can't* travel the ISO route; that produced the lovely and famous OSI model, but no practical code, in the long term. That is, without the test of implementation, which requires releasing standards *before* they're ready, so that problems can be found, and especially so that *cruft* can be removed, there's no joy in generating network standards. The process has to be interactive: development feeds standardization feeds development, and having two organizations in charge, rather than one, is likely to be more productive of bureaucracy than of sound, implementable recommendations. >>These activities MUST be separate, as much as it would be >>convenient for us all to move directly from revolutionary >>technology advances to universally accepted standards without >>a period of chaotic natural selection in the middle. > >It's convenient to move directly, and it does seem to give the W3C a strong >selling point for getting people to buy memberships. Unfortunately, those >activities ARE NOT separate in reality, whatever the documents may say on >the surface. I think that this is true, and I think that, in the realm of W3C standards, this tends to mean that the vendors who can afford representation are going to 1) have advance notice of the shape of future standards, 2) be able to shape those standards (within limits) to meet their needs, but also 3) these vendors are going to also use their muscle in the market to make the standards real. That's what I think the tradeoff is. W3C allows itself to be "bought", and in so doing has gained the power of those vendors. But ... [snip, and a reversal of order from the original quoted material] >>Nevertheless, as long as the W3C serves as the "treaty >>organization" within which pragmatic compromises that >>result in consensual Recommendations are made, I don't >>believe that more "sunshine" would help. > >Then perhaps it's time for the W3C to leave the treaty organization >business, and focus on technical innovation. Here, Simon, I don't think you are correct. From my outsider's perspective (I've followed the web since UNC got its first connections, back around '90-'91, but I haven't been involved in the creation of things), the W3C has two outstanding successes to its credit, and one major fiasco, all three of which I think are likely to be in the minds of policy makers at W3C. The fiasco is HTML 3.0. W3C didn't really start as a standards organization, after all, or as a vendor consortium; it started as a sort of forum of folks wanting to popularize the web as a means of intercommunication. At the height of the browser wars, W3C went bumbling off toward HTML 3.0, a standards-development project that paid no visible attention to the "earth-shattering" advances then taking place in browsers, which were released with rather astonishing frequency (and that whole muddle is in large part responsible for the chaotic and fragmented nature of the modern web, I think). W3C was roundly ignored, leading to ... HTML 3.2, the first spectacular success, and the event that really turned W3C from being an organization for the advocacy of HTML and HTTP to being a vendor consortium. W3C became a treaty-making organization, and one of the sacrifices was the "purity" of the original HTML spec. But by including the (sometimes horribly crufty) features that the major vendors demanded, W3C was also able to get them to agree to implement the other (horribly crufty) features that the competition insisted on, and by getting that agreement, also able to label certain things as "not standards-compliant HTML," and have that mean something. So I don't think that the powers-that-be within the policy-making structure of the W3C are ever likely to unlearn treaty-making. The burn from HTML 3.0, and the resolution in 3.2, probably goes deep and will last long. But the other outstanding success of the W3C is of a completely different character. That's XML. The spec is brilliant (it's *short*! You can read and understand it! And the content provides truly enormous power). Initially positioned as a resolution of the problems and shortcomings of HTML (so I first learned of it, at least), it has turned out to have deep-reaching implications that have not yet been explored. In fact, the XML standard, for the first time (insofar as my knowledge of W3C goes) created a situation in which the vendors were scrambling to catch up, giving W3C time to produce additional thoughtful things like XSLT/XPath and SVG. What I'm trying to get at, I guess, is that with the introduction of XML, W3C began to change character, from the treaty-making represented by HTML 3.2 (and CSS, ineffective as that attempt was), to something more similar to the innovative role played by the IETF. In the days of treaty-making, the relatively long-term process that the IETF has in place was a barrier; the W3C *had* to keep up with the vendors. However, I think that XML may have changed that: it's so rich and complex a ground that the vendors are going to be playing keep up with that alone for some time yet, especially for the data-centric applications. So perhaps web time has slowed, and it might now be possible for W3C to open its process as fully as IETF (I'm a rabid admirer of the IETF, as you can tell). I'm not sure, though, that that will happen, given that the history of the W3C teaches the lesson that the 800-pound gorillas *gotta* be listened to. >>and perhaps more willing to defer to the ISO on the really messy >>business of casting Recommendations into concrete Standards. > >There have been a number of questions about ISO's fitness for this task - >I'd love to see some of the more ISO-aware folks here talk about how such >relations work and what might be done to improve them. Boo, hiss! I'm sure that there are some ISO folks here who will take me soundly to task, but that's *not* a path I want to see any organization travel. The problem with those folks is that they have truly evil fee scales. You can't buy their stuff for the cost of publication, or the cost of publication and shipping, or the cost of publication and shipping and warehousing and a fine meal at the three star restaurant of your choice. Some of the prices for specs are astonishingly extortionate, and effectively mean that interested lone developers have no chance of looking at them. They're clearly priced to be taken as a business expense. So even when a standard is nice and stable, I don't want to see it under the aegis of ISO or its member institutions, because the only way I could afford to read the silly things would be to convince my manager that I really, really have to have it (and then wait for delivery, unless they've managed to finally get the bugs out of the electronic delivery system (and gotten their standards into a format other than MS Word)). I've had to get standards from ISO and ANSI for several different projects, and both pain and expense were astonishing and unpleasant. In contrast, I pay the cost of connection to download a zip containing all of the RFCs (something I wish that W3C would do, btw, since the specs are in a bewildering variety of formats, and half the time when I download them I end up with all sorts of interestingly broken links). So can any developer who wants to implement a non-standard standard issued as a Request for Comments by IETF (and if you're willing to cope with the pain of searching out and downloading the things, the same goes for W3C). As a quick example, getting the first three (framework, foundation, cli) parts of the SQL standard (there are two more parts, for stored procedures and language bindings), from my price check a moment ago, would run $500. I don't get a discount for having purchased a previous version, of course. Standards are the only thing I can think of that have pricing models less attractive than software. I don't think, regardless of government legislation requiring compliance, that turning over perfectly usable standards to organizations that aren't capable of producing them is the solution (that's a jab ... I had to write decodes for ISO SP and TP at one point, and had to pay for the standards (bloody company I worked for was too cheap) ... and the vendor dropped the whole stack from their suite of tools anyway, on grounds of lack of interest, because not even the government uses that stuff). So, rah rah the IETF and the open model of the IETF, and may W3C move in that direction, as XML's publication may let them do. Amy! -- Amelia A. Lewis alicorn@m... amyzing@t... I don't know that I ever wanted greatness, on its own. It seems rather like wanting to be an engineer, rather than wanting to design something--or wanting to be a writer, rather than wanting to write. It should be a by-product, not a thing in itself. Otherwise, it's just an ego trip. -- Merlin, son of Corwin, Prince of Chaos (Roger Zelazny) 
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