re: Gunfight at the WS Corral

Thus blogged Tim Bray on the matter of the Gunfight at the WS Corral:

"But I wonder why, if there are differing ideas on how to solve this problem, and there is a standards organization at work, the differing ideas aren’t being hashed out in the standards organization."

Maybe he should read his own blog to find the answer;-)

"When committees get together either in an informal cabal or an official standards process, and go about inventing new technologies, the results are usually pretty bad. ODA (Never heard of it? Exactly); OSI Networking; W3C XML Schemas. The list goes on and on."

I've cited his post before and I agreed then, and still believe, that a standards group is no place to do development. Successful standards are those where the technology is proven and is well along the way to broad adoption before a committee is formed to produce a standard.

Others at Sun who appreciate this include Jim Waldo. Maybe next time Tim is in Burlington, he should have a chat with Jim.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I'm the gunslinger to which his post refers:-) Most of the issues I raised in my critical comparison of the two competing specifications were logged as issues against the WS-R specification, so apparently, there must have been some technical merit to the points I raised. You'll also note that many of the WSRM TC's rebuttal statements are of the nature "we're fixing the spec".

Let us not forget that the definition of a camel is: a horse designed by committee.