ISO and HTML

On Thu, 27 Mar 1997, MegaZone wrote:

> There are a great many people who don't consider ISO the end all and be
> all of standards boards.  And a few of us who laugh at the thought.  A
> world run by ISO would grind to a halt.

I definitely appreciate ISO in general, but not all things can be
standardized along the same procedures. As regards to HTML and the Web,
the ISO standardization process is too slow (and the slowness of that
process is basically inherent, for reasons which justify the long
delays in many areas). We can't simply wait for years to have 
the next development phase of standard HTML, so it is better to live
with e.g. W3C standards "only" instead of ISO standards.

The practical question is how to shoot down the ISO HTML standardization
effort as fast as possible. (There might be good ideas on the draft, 
deserving due consideration by W3C, of course.) I'm pretty sure that
it is relatively easy to convince _one_ national standardization body
about the whole thing (of HTML standardization _by ISO_) being a wrong
idea, thus preventing the approval by ISO, but this would by the hard way,
from the viewpoint of wasted human resources. Any better ideas?

Yucca, http://www.hut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Friday, 28 March 1997 02:30:49 UTC