An article on a different type of light weight standards development process

Another view on how the traditional development model could be different:

Toward a Saner Standards Process
Simon St. Laurent, O'Reilly Radar

"[...] Many standards processes, though not as many as I'd like,
actually are culling and cleaning prior work. XML was culling and
cleaning SGML. XSL was culling and cleaning DSSSL. XLink was culling
and cleaning HyTime. Both of those processes, though imperfect,
succeeded in producing something smaller and more usable. In the case
of XML, that smaller and more usable transformed the way computing
works. In the case of XLink, they produced a spec, but it's rarely
used. XSL wound up somewhere in the middle.

There's a political problem here, however. While we need software
developers to experiment in real code, letting us figure out which
things work in reality, those same developers generally want to
maximize the return on their work. Often that means the reason they
would invest in a standards process to steer it to do what they want...

My proposal combines the necessary role of software developers with
a standardization process run by the direct consumers of that software,
not its creators. That means two phases of development: (1)  Invention:
A very loosely-directed phase which opens with a call for proposals,
possibly a meeting that generates a loose description of the work to
be done. Developers can band together and form alliances to build work
that answers to that description. Hopefully, multiple groups will take
up the challenge, producing alternatives for exploration. (2) Selection:
A formal group of customers - customers who don't work for the
implementers and inventors - evaluates the results of the development
phase to figure out what pieces work most easily. They may be able to
standardize in a single round, or they may have to select some parts
while leaving others open for further development and later
standardization...

There are pieces of this idea already in the works. The early XML crowd
was definitely built around people whose livings depended on using
markup rather than creating software. In the CSS world, vendors
experiment pretty freely with new possibilities as clearly-marked
extensions, allowing developers to try them out and determine how well
they work before committing to their broad use. The W3C makes a point
of trying to include companies that use their specifications as well
as companies that build software around their specifications. Boeing
has been a canonical example of that in the XML world..."

http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2010/06/toward-a-saner-standards-proce-1.html

See the new Gesmer.com http://www.gesmer.com

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