Re: XML protocol comparison

Re: XML protocol comparison

   RE: XML protocol comparison

> Perhaps the perception derives from the fact
> that you excluded your competitors from the design process of ICE.
>   We tried to get involved, and had the door slammed in our face.
Arrogance begets isolation, outages are always routed around.

I am the chair of the ICE Authoring Group, and have been since its
inception. As such, I cannot allow Dave's continued misrepresentation to
go without comment. 

In terms of Dave's company having "had the door slammed in our face," my
contact information has been on every release of the ICE specification,
and I have never been contacted by anyone from UserLand about
participation in the ICE effort. I certainly would welcome your
participation in the ICE Network. My email address is laird@io.com (or
laird.popkin@sothebys.com), and my office phone number is 212/774-5338.

I don't know who you spoke with at Vignette, but since they don't run the
ICE effort, you may have made a "protocol error" -- if you asked a random
Microsoft or Adobe employee, for example, they couldn't have been too
helpful either. Other the other hand, the people listed as contacts on the
standard would certainly have welcomed your contact.

The repeated presentation of ICE as being run by Vignette is incorrect.
Vignette initiated the ICE effort, but from the beginning the ICE AG
members have had equal votes, and funded ICE AG activities equally.
Vignette does not control either the AG or its composition; applications
for membership are administered by The GCA's IDEAlliance, an independent
organization, and are voted on by the ICE AG members, each of whom have a
single vote.

A critical component of ICE's success thus far, I believe, is that a
majority of the AG is and must be content companies, not vendors,
specifically to ensure that the ICE standard is driven by market needs 
rather than vendor goals. Thus, while there are a number of vendors active
in the AG, even if they all voted together they could not control the AG.

>   Maybe Vignette will lose some of the arrogance and work openly on
syndication technologies.

Vignette doesn't run the ICE effort, and the ICE AG has always been open
to input and participation by any interested parties.  For what it's
worth, the Vignette employees participating in the ICE effort have never
been arrogant; they were quite open to fundamental changes in their
initial proposals based on arguments by other AG members.

The ICE effort has been open since the beginning; I will admit that our
efforts have been more focused on creating the standard and in working
with participating vendors and content companies to get ICE implemented
and deployed than in marketing the protocol to standards groups; we felt
that was premature until we'd had sufficient experience in production to
have more credibility.

With ICE 1.0 being in production for over a year, we've produced ICE 1.1
and are stepping up our "outreach" efforts this year.

To get back to the topic of this mailing list, I can say that I would
welcome the development of a standard approach to building protocols in
XML. A good percentage of the ICE specification addresses fairly generic
protocol issues (e.g. packaging, request/response, header/body, logging,
etc.) that were required in order to achieve ICE's goals, but which could
be addressed in a common manner across many protocols, allowing the ICE AG
to focus on the issues around content exchange by layering over a generic
messaging standard, in the same way that we layer over generic transport
standards (HTTP, SSL, sockets, mail, etc.), XML, and so on. I would hope
that we could participate in the development of such a standard in order
to (1) contribute the real-world production experience that ICE has
accumulated, and (2) ensure that the generic XML messaging standard would
support ICE's needs.

   Dave

- Laird Popkin, CTO, Sotheby's Holdings and Chair, ICE Authoring Group.
  laird.popkin@sothebys.com, laird@io.com, 212/774-5338.

Received on Saturday, 20 May 2000 03:19:39 UTC