- From: Simon St.Laurent <simonstl@simonstl.com>
- Date: 22 Mar 2002 09:24:34 -0500
- To: www-tag@w3.org
On Thu, 2002-03-21 at 21:29, Mark Nottingham wrote: > Put another way; is there a good reason for putting up boundaries, other > than as a means to allocate resources? Sure. There are lots of good reasons. * Clarity - People and organziations interacting with the W3C will have a clearly stated set of understandings regarding what the W3C is and is not. This makes it much simpler to begin communications about the work of the W3C. Clarity can also be useful internally as I've noted previously. * Focus - Even if the W3C suddenly found itself blessed with an unlimited budget, would it really make sense to go out and take on every task members and staff were interested in pursuing? I'm sure members enjoy having a pre-existing organzational structure rather than rolling their own, but how does the W3C define its mission? * Consistency - The W3C is well-regarded because of the success of a few key projects. While the nature of those projects can evolve, the outside world's perspective on the W3C will likely evolve more slowly. * Diplomacy - It's easier for other organizations to work with the W3C when the lines of demarcation are clear. When the W3C made clear that it was not going to work on either event-based parsing of XML or vertical industry XML vocabularies, the XML community was able to build its projects with an assurance that the PR giant of the area wasn't going to take over their work. (Both of those projects appear to fit easily in the current unscoped definition of the Web currently in use.) > The Consortium is quite resource-constrained right now, and this > could be one mechanism of addressing that; IMHO, however, it is > an inferior one. I'd like to see issues addressed on their own > merits, on a case-by-case basis, rather than having a > constraining architecture making the decisions ahead of time. Statements like this leave me asking "so what exactly is the Consortium?" despite having watched it for years. I keep hearing that identity is a critical feature of the Web, and I'd like to see the W3C amd the Web develop identities that go beyond mere identifiers. -- Simon St.Laurent Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets Errors, errors, all fall down! http://simonstl.com
Received on Friday, 22 March 2002 08:19:33 UTC