Re: Look out!

At 10:59 AM 1/28/2002 -0500, Phill Jenkins wrote:
>Are you saying that people shouldn't get to put stuff on the internet if 
>they don't have the freedom to protect it?

I hope that's not what I'm saying.

What I am saying is that the recent effort to make the process of setting 
standards be beholden to patent/copyright considerations is a huge step 
backward. I am saying that many participating members continue to ignore 
the standards, in particular those dealing with accessibility. I am saying 
that the effort to "own" the internet/Web/network should be strongly fought 
by W3C rather than the consortium being a creature of the members. The 
feeling that they are "allowed" in the consortium, rather than that it's 
"theirs" is what I'm addressing.

PJ::  "...PF & EO? These groups are as about as
opposite as it gets..."

The PF/EO thing might seem at first blush to be  "disparity in action" but 
the maintenance of rigorous standards and the dissemination of the idea 
behind all this are inseparable. In PF we have created a basis for almost 
all the W3C's "standards" with our XAG. The conformance thereto is spotty 
at best and should be mandatory for membership. The EO effort is how all 
this gets fed to the ultimate participants: everybody. They've even passed 
laws based on this work but we're still faced with members who live outside 
the law. Pandering to "old tired ethics" of "idea ownership" in an era when 
that concept is bankrupt is dangerous to our mission.

The "alarmist" nature of the subject line is based (I think soundly) on 
vast past experience wherein a great idea becomes corrupted by an absence 
of vigilance on the part of those closest to the idea. Not to point 
fingers, but the creators of both XMetaL (SoftQuad) and XMLSpy (Altova) 
have made zero effort to participate in the extremely important matter of 
making their tools both accessible to PWD and to produce XAG-compliant 
materials. We have done little/nothing to make such ignorance of our 
principles unacceptable. A year from now when there is a huge struggle to 
retrofit those efforts we can look back at this time when something was 
possible and again rue the loss of Yuri Rubinsky.

--
Love.

It's Bad Luck to be Superstitious!

Received on Monday, 28 January 2002 12:34:25 UTC