Re: Scope of W3C recommendations; core issue for polyglot & DRM

On 1/28/2013 8:53 AM, Larry Masinter wrote:
> Personally, I think W3C members and the web community care about
> interoperability of the public web to closed systems, and that many of the
> Recommendations and Working groups in W3C are developing standards whose
> initial deployment is focused on closed systems.

I agree. There are all kinds of ways in which the split between closed and 
open organizations isn't a split at all. They might use the same tools, but 
even if not, they depending on the same training and talent pools. We want 
someone who knows XML, or XSLT or JSON to be able to use those skills to 
create content for the "open Web" in the morning and, if needed, for closed 
environments in the afternoon. We want him/her to be able to take back and 
forth experience with the same tools and bug fixes. We want them to be able 
to get their questions answered on Stack Overflow.

All that is before we get to the most important point: it's not just the 
talent, code and insights that often move in unexpected ways, it's the 
content. Even if for some good reason an employee list in XML or JSON might 
not leave a corporation, a mapping file they use to geo code the zip codes 
in which those employees live into latitude/longitude might be pulled from 
the Web. Someday a summary report from that otherwise confidential employee 
list might feed the public Web server after all. And indeed, even if the 
organization keeps completely separate public and intranets, they might 
well want to assure that the same Apache infrastructure and XML/JSON 
related plugs work for both.

Network effects apply in many important ways.

Noah

Received on Monday, 28 January 2013 14:25:18 UTC