Re: GOTCHA!

[David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx>]

> Remember, we're dealing with the group of people that thought 
> ...
> Anyhow, my point is that unless the W3C starts addressing the concerns and
> interests such as you outline, 

In my limited experience (as an invited member on the W3C Math working
group) That's not how things work. There is not a global `W3C Mafia'
with a secret agenda to design unusable languages.

The Working Groups act more or less independently as groups of
interested individuals and/or companies. The W3C plays an important
coordinating role making sure that the various groups can know what each
other are up and that the various draft proposals have a chance of
working together. Also of course the W3C as a body has the final say in
voting to promote (or not) a proposal up to the status of
`recommendation' which is the quaint W3C spelling of `standard':-)
But the basic design is done by individuals, using time essentially
donated by their companies, not by some monolithic organisation at the
W3C.

I'm not on the XSL group (thankfully:-) but a glance at the list of
people and companies at the end of the current working draft (appendix
E) shows several different companies, including some of the ones (like
MS) that you hint will want to ignore the W3C and do their own thing.

Of course it may still happen that a language spec is finally agreed
that proves to be unworkable or unpopular, that's life, but I don't
think that that you can infer anything about the actions of one
particular group of people from the actions of a disjoint group,
even if both groups happen to be working under a W3C umbrella.

David


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