"Clean Specs"

[Tim Bray]

At 01:24 AM 2/8/99 -0500, Tyler Baker wrote:
>Well who is the best judge then?  I thought that standards bodies were largely in existence to
>promote concensus on matters which companies and organizations disagree upon.  Rather than
>bring everyone together, this entire "Namespaces in XML" recommendation has splintered the
>entire XML community.

Uh, just for the record, Namespaces, like any other W3C recommendation,
has been through a *long* formal process with many public drafts, and a 
final poll of the membership.  Yes, there are those who disagree, but
this is true of virtually every recommendation; there were those who
wanted to send XML 1.0 back for more work - same with every other
significant W3C product.  Consensus in the pure form is never achieved
in any standards organization.  Operationally, the closest you can
get is a determination that all substantive objections have been
thoroughly listened-to, and a finding that an overwhelming majority
of the community wants to move forward.

>I am a forgiving person 

It doesn't particularly show.

>They are the
>real "silent majority" that the W3C seems to have complete disdain for.

Well, the Mozilla, perl, Internet Explorer, Oracle, and IBM XML offerings
already include namespace support.  The majority is awfully silent I
guess. 
 -Tim


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