Re: Introducing NetscapeML

Ka-Ping Yee wrote:
|Don't beg.  DEMAND!
| 
|You are the User and this is a free market; it is *you* whom all must
|satisfy.  Begging will not effect change, as history has shown.

So many people seem to believe that if they keep repeating statements like
this that others will start to believe them and they will become true.

OK.  I'm supposed to *not* download a free copy of Navigtor today and 
e-mail Netscape explaining why.  That'll really show em.  

HTML evolution is being driven by members of a W3C that has an entry fee
that is relatively small for corporations, relatively high for academic
institutions and non existent for individuals.  Members of the W3C, in 
general, are software vendors.  Software vendors' priorities are driven, in 
turn, by their influential, high-volume customers.  Their influential,
high-volume customers, by and large, are commercial information providers, 
(the people who brought you commercial television) not end users or providers
of intellectual-quality information.  The needs of these information providers 
that provide the bulk of income to vendors who pay the W3C's bills become 
the most important influences on the standards process.  

The the line between product differentiation and interoperability is a 
thin one as well.  Your data might get trapped encoded in dead-end
markup or imprisoned in a proprietary disk cache.

The bottom line is that standards that don't coincide with those of the 
vendors and commercial information aggregators just don't happen in the 
current environment.

The vendors needs are being met.  The information providers needs are
being met.  Where does this leave the end user when it comes to issues of
privacy and data longevity except for atomized in their homes?

-marc

Received on Sunday, 30 June 1996 02:11:15 UTC