From: jamesd@netcom.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Sun, 11 Dec 94 17:33:08 PST
To: amanda@intercon.com (Amanda Walker)
Subject: Re: BofA+Netscape
In-Reply-To: <199412120041.TAA00883@intercon.com>
Message-ID: <199412120131.RAA14755@netcom10.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


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