RE: [xtm-wg] Status of Core Deliverables document

["Mason, James (MXM) " <mxm@ornl.gov>]

An overall comment from an old timer:

I take no stands at the moment on any technical issue being discussed in
XTM. However, I'm worried by some things I'm hearing in the discussion.

While it's important to reach a stable condition with respect to XTM, making
stability, per se, a goal is not a good idea. 

I'm now in my 20th year of observing the SGML/XML business, so I tend to
take a long view (I don't believe in "internet time"). We need to think
about why we're looking for stability. For years certain parties insisted on
maintaining absolute stability of the specification for SGML. Accordingly,
ISO 8879:1986 went about a decade without changes, even though many people
knew of things that might be made better by a change. Getting acceptance of
UNICODE/ISO 10646 into SGML was a major breakthrough. 

I get worried when I hear that we shouldn't change a standard because people
are already writing software to fit it, are doing research on it, etc. I
heard that for far too long as an excuse for not fixing 8879. 

One result of the fixation on stability was that a bunch of people got tired
of how stability was being maintained, and they went off and started XML
under the auspices of another organization. 

Certainly we don't want to blow our user base out of the water by a change.
But neither do we want to make stability a sacred cow and give the
iconoclasts (in the original sense) a reason to break the larger unity from
which both the standards developers and their user community benefit in the
long term.

Jim Mason

James David Mason, Ph.D.

(Chairman ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34)
http://www.y12.doe.gov/sgml/sc34
Y-12 National Security Complex
Bldg. 9113, Room 337I
P.O. Box 2009, M.S. 8208
Oak Ridge, TN 37831-8208

+1 865 574 6973



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