<ASIDE>I have to say that I'm mystified, though incredibly impressed, that the
Software Publishers Association actually found the guts to take on one of
their largest members.)</ASIDE>
A lot of the work we've done so far on XML-Dev and a lot of the work to come
is incredibly dependent on a very few market movers choosing to support
standards they don't fully control. If XML is going to make it, those folks
had better get used to liking standards they don't fully control, and which
may in fact make their lives more difficult and their profits harder to come
by. Interoperability means less of a lock-in for vendors - we might as well
face it.
A few of us are lucky enough to be working on projects, either in the SGML
world or in niches of XML development where browsers per se don't matter, but
the rest of us are sitting around waiting for some serious implementations
from the large vendors, waiting to be able to take screen shots that
demonstrate that XML can actually be used in an environment that's cheap,
widely available, and standardized across platforms. XML: A Primer got by
with painfully repetitive output from the MSXML parser, but the next edition
had better have screen shots from multiple browsers, created with XML and CSS,
or readers are going to lose interest.
I hope the WSP can put some backbone in the standards process, providing a
close examination of vendor claims for standards support and giving vendors a
strong incentive to endorse standards - especially standards, like SMIL, in
whose development they participated.
Where do I send my check?
</RANT>
Back to writing about @#X! proxy servers...
Simon St.Laurent
Dynamic HTML: A Primer / XML: A Primer / Cookies