W3 Consortium, was Re: Standards Article

[Tom Worthington]

At 04:33 PM 9/10/97 +0800, Roger Debreceny wrote:

>...As I understand the situation, Tim Berners-Lee and the W3 Consortium made
>the deliberate decision *not* to proceed thru the ISO, as the time taken at
>the ISO was considerably longer than the half life of a W3C "standard". I
>guess we've worked with RFCs for many years...

Yes, the tradition has been for IT standards to be made via the national and
ISO processes. This wasn't fast enough for the Internet. The failure of OSI
and GOSIP, plus the reluctance of formal standards bodies to embrace the
on-line way of doing things (and to see themselves as Intellectual Property
creators, rather than paper publishers) has lead to a split.

This is going to cause increasing problems as Internet "standards" become
economically and socially important. We have already seen the problems with
defining Java as a formal standard. This contrasts with the success and
acceptance of formal standardization of Ada (of course some will argue it is
only unsuccessful technology which gets successfully standardized). 

I suggest we need to bring the two sides together, to have standards which
are both sufficiently rigorousness defined and responsive to needs.


Tom Worthington <tomw@acslink.net.au> President, Australian Computer Society,
GPO Box 446, Canberra ACT 2601 http://www.acslink.net.au/~tomw
Fax: +61 2 62496419
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