Erwin's StarOffice Tango

Erwin's StarOffice Tango
Erwin Tenhumberg's Insights into Open Source and Dancing
... or why Open Competition matters

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Donnerstag Juni 16, 2005

"Specification Proliferation"
"Other kinds of standardization work can be thought of as separative efforts, in effect saying, "The existing stuff isn't good enough, so we need this..." or, "Sometimes, general purpose is too general." The push for a binary variant of XML is a good example of this kind of thinking. Arguably, so are the XML formats recently announced for Microsoft Office 12, some of the work from the WHAT WG, and the alphabet soup of overlapping Web Services standards. Developers have learned to have healthy skepticism for these things. Just as we have seen with licensing, often the need for forking has been overstated, and attaching to current, ongoing work is the better strategy. For anyone evaluating the worth of a particular standard, I suggest that the same three criteria adopted by OSI make a good touchstone for a potential standard:

1. It shouldn't be duplicative of another more-established standard.
2. It should be clearly written and easy to understand.
3. It should reuse existing standards instead of reinventing things."

I only remember XML being mentioned as a reused standard in Microsoft's recent XML file format announcement. OASIS OpenDocument on the other hand reuses quite a few existing open standards in addition to XML, e.g. HTML, SVG, XSL, SMIL, XLink, XForms, MathML, and the Dublin Core.

The full article can be found here.
( Jun 16 2005, 05:31:56 AM CEST ) Permalink