Re: Winning battles but losing the war

At 02:19 PM 2/12/97 -0400, Murray Altheim wrote:
>"Henry S. Thompson" <ht@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> writes:
>>Who's supposed to be making our case at the W3C level?  I've just seen
>>a lengthy report from a UK representative of last month's W3C meeting,
>>and XML is barely there: 2 one-line mentions in a 10-page report on a
>>3-day meeting.  Numerous questions were raised to which XML is the
>>answer, but apparently no-one gave that answer, e.g.
>>
>>  "Some felt that there should be an HTML extension mechanism (similar
>>  to PEP for HTTP). Dan Connolly would produce a HTML briefing paper".
>>
>>Why doesn't this say "Dan Connolly pointed out that XML addressed this
>>need directly."?

I suspect Dan would argue with that proposition; I'm fairly sure TBL would
if pinned down. Nobody on W3C staff said a kind word for XML when I and
others brought it up. XML was not given air time; or rather it was listed
on the agenda but time ran out during the final "quiz the staff" session.

I hope next year someone from the SGML ERB will be given an hour to present
the glowing success story. But we'll have to get XML far up the pipeline in
the W3C process for that to happen; that pipeline is clogged, and if XML
doesn't burst loose in Santa Clara it might not get another chance this
year. (I wish I could be there.)


/kmc

Received on Thursday, 13 February 1997 04:35:00 UTC