I wrote:
Well guys, the victor has room to move. It must come as a big shock to Apple, Microsoft, and IBM, but reality is that Netscape can set WWW standards and they cannot.
Amanda Walker writes
I disagree. The WWW is no longer a research project, and if it is to survive it will have to do so by consensus, either formal or informal. That's what standards committees, and groups like the IETF, exist to facilitate.
Consensus between who and who? When they implement crypto, perhaps they should listen to us cypherpunks, but when they add new SGML tags, and new subfields for existing tags, why should they give a tinkers dam what Apple thinks? Now plainly they should listen very carefully to what the guys at CERN say about SGML tags, but as far as I can see, the groups that you want them to take consensus with, have no standing in this matter. What right has apple got to demand that its views be considered? They should discuss SGML with Mosaic, and encryption with RSA, but I have seen little good come out of these standards committees. Open standards are great, but a camel is a horse designed by a committee. CERN came down from the mountain top, and decreed what HTML and HTTP should be, and that was a truly open and successful standard. Very few such standards have emerged from comittees. If anything Netscape is paying too much attention to official committees and too little attention to reality. (for example their irrelevant ID protocol for secure transfer.) and if Netscape descends from the mountain and proclaims a superset of HTML and additional HTTP behavior, then provided that they are open and retain backward compatibility, that is the way to go. If their proclamation is flawed, they will not get away with it. If their proclamation is OK, being developed from practice instead of bureaucratic politicing, then they will get away with it. For example consider the standards committee on SQL. It is just a political issue: What companies on the standards committee decide to do is deemed good, what others do is deemed bad. As a result the SQL "standard" is now just a random pile that does not make any sense. This is OK when the standards committee is dominated by those on the leading edge of technology, but irrelevant and harmful when they are lagging. A few years back, when the standards for new RAM chips were debated, those who were lagging decreed that any ram chip beyond their technology to make was deemed to be non standard. Needless to say, today we all use non standard RAM chips. A similar thing occurred with the move to higher floppy disk densities. Those who could not double, decreed the next density increase would not be to double the previous density. Again, the floppy standard was non standard. In short, when the leading edge company dominates the standards committee, it is of little use, when the old companies dominate the standards committee, it is actually harmful. -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- We have the right to defend ourselves and our property, because of the kind of animals that we James A. Donald are. True law derives from this right, not from the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state. jamesd@netcom.com