Re: ANNOUNCE: XHTML mailing list at eGroups

At 09:20 AM 5/3/00 -0500, Dan Connolly wrote:
>In retrospect, I think it's quite unfortunate that xml-dev is
>not hosted by W3C; there's simple practical matters like
>the stability of the archives and the operational reliability
>of delivery, which W3C is responsible to provide,
>while ic.ac.uk did it on a sort of volunteer basis
>and oasis.org is having trouble doing at all.

I'm not sure that XML-Dev's lack of W3C affiliation has hurt it overall,
though the recent performance issues have certainly caused problems.  See
more below.  (As for XHTML-L, I'm not 100% convinced that eGroups is ideal,
but it provides a lot of useful facilities that go beyond the list itself.)

>But there's a more substantive issue of loyalty and a sense of
>community. Folks see xml-dev as somehow "outside" of W3C
>just because the address doesn't end in @w3.org. To me,
>xml-dev (comp.text.xml and ...) are essential parts of the
>Web Community and the W3C process. I didn't expect
>folks to see it as so separate from W3C just because
>of the domain name.

Is that really so bad?  

I posted the announcement to invite people to join, not to start
controversy, but I'm not so sure that some sense of separation is a bad
thing.  The W3C is a membership organization with a particular agenda, and
I think the user community typically has its own agendas.   The two can
usually live in harmony, but I'm not sure that hosting user community
resources at the standards consortium site is always the best idea.  

Among other things, separate hosting can make it clear that we're focused
on implementation, not developing the specs themselves (though XML-Dev has
certainly blurred those lines.)

Even apart from those diverging interests, I'd hope the W3C would be happy
to see that outsiders are interested enough in their work to set up lists
for discussing and implementing them.  There are an enormous number of Web
technology-focused lists outside the W3C, and I think they complement the
W3C's own offerings.

>So if you're creating XHTML-L to allow the XML community
>to have discussions separate from the Web community,
>I think that's counterproductive and I hope you'll
>reconsider.

Actually, I think it's quite productive.  I'm not sure if we've crossed
wires here - the intent is to give the XML community and the HTML community
a place to meet, not to give the XML community a new and separate home for
talking about XHTML.  I hope very much that XHTML-L will be a constructive
part of the Web community, and that members of the W3C community in
particular will feel welcome.

Simon St.Laurent
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
Building XML Applications
Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical
Cookies / Sharing Bandwidth
http://www.simonstl.com

Received on Wednesday, 3 May 2000 10:44:58 UTC