Re: complexity (was: Re: XHTML and RDF)

> Oh, sure perhaps most *companies* in W3C do some form of software
> development, but that does not mean that the representatives themselves
> actually write software on a day to day basis.

It's always been the case that companies send their intellectually
strongest people to standards committees, rather than use them in
production work.  This is partly to give the world an impression that
the people who do the production work are much more skilled than
is actually the case.  In part it is because you can produce a
saleable product that is far from perfect and an ordinary production
developer won't notice the imperfections, but someone of standards
committee calibre will spot them, tending to increase the development
cost.

The other sort of person that companies send to standards committees
is political manipulators, who are good at making the standard match
their current implementation, reducing costs to them and increasing
those to their competitors.

Both these views are ones that I developed before the development of
the W3C and I don't know the W3C personalities well enough to 
classify them properly.

Received on Thursday, 8 April 2004 02:56:17 UTC