Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

 
bestkungfu: Atom/W3C redux.  The Atom folk convened at Sun last week, and this is Matt May's take on finding a home for development of Atom specifications on someone's standards-track process.  Tim Bray provided a running report on the meeting, with photos, and there will be more precincts reporting in, I'm certain.  Sam Ruby's blog entry is attracting useful comments.

In Matt's account I noticed some possible confusion in the Atom community and elsewhere about the anointing process of the IETF versus the W3C.  In the IETF, as I understand it, the first stage is Proposed Standard, and that means just what it says.  A few years later, a Draft Standard can appear, and that will be based on the existence of independent, interoperable implementations (I-cubed?) and winnowing of the specification to account for the reality of what interoperates and what was changed to make it work.  More years later, IETF Standard status (as in standard light-bulb sockets) is recognition of an established fact.  A common feature of both processes is that the early public specifications are communal articulations of a good idea (but perhaps with more requirement for early implementation and a test suite of some sort in the W3C case), with development and adoption in practice governed by other forces.

I favor the IETF process, having seen it at work.  I also fancy the way the W3C works to make some sort of coherent organism out of all the different pieces (and infection models) that have arisen around the World-Wide Web.  It is interesting to me that the Atomists fear high-jacking in the W3C. It does seem easier to avoid that in the IETF process, except someone can come up with a competing solution there without much difficulty (using Informational RFC specifications, for example).  You pay your money and take your chances.  W3C specifications are easier to handle -- they are Hypertext documents, of course, and they are on the web.  For some, that's a sexier result.  Waffle, waffle, waffle.

Matt May is a W3C wonk.  He has interesting things to say about W3C activities and, thanks to this Scoble spotting, I also find someone with an interest in glossaries.  I will have to talk to him about the Feuding Lexicographers game (and track his feed if I can find a way to stop NewsGator puking on it).  It might be a benchmark use case for Atom.  That would not have occurred to me without all this blogosphere connection-making.  And I can't keep up with 100 news feeds, I don't want to think about 1400.  Requires a breakthrough in my non-use of heavyweight technology.

posted by orcmid at 6/4/2004 07:32:26 AM