Moving on...

W3C is a vendor consortium and it is perfectly natural that its employees
should do what is in the best interest of its members: increase the market
for their product. Beating up on them isn't going to change the basic fact
of their corporate sponsorship. HTML 3.2 is the prefect product for their
members.

Those of us who are interested in a serious standard for serious online
publishing should not depend on either W3C or HTML. Waiting around for HTML
to "mature" for two years has got us nowhere. We are no closer to reliable,
robust, standards-based online publishing than we were a couple of years
ago. There are enough of us that we should be able to build a "sub-market"
for plug-ins, Java applets, helper applications and full fledged browsers
for an HTML alternative.

What if we started with TEI Lite or Docbook, instead, and turned that into a
standards-track RFC? Or what if we didn't choose a particular SGML DTD at
all, but went for a flexible SGML architecture instead? As Dan has been
implying, the problem doesn't lie with W3C, its with those of us that expect
them to do the work we do not want to (or cannot afford to do) ourselves.
Instead of griping, (okay, in addition to griping... =) ) we need a plan. We
need to organize. We need to get down to work.

 Paul Prescod

Received on Wednesday, 8 May 1996 09:28:23 UTC