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Arjun Ray writes: > Sure. Which, unfortunately, is part of my larger point. I believe that > an unconscionable amount of time and energy of many good people was wasted > on having to produce something on Namespaces regardless. I cannot speak for everyone, but I don't remember quite that attitude in the WG. Certainly some of us (including me) were [expletive deleted] off at the late change, but my impression was that most of us believed we were still producing a worthwhile spec and that it was still the most important task we had in front of us. > The WG was not allowed to say to the W3C: "we have more important things > to think about". We weren't? Certainly, we had to consider the needs of other WG's -- XSLT and XHTML, for example, couldn't go to REC without Namespaces -- but I don't remember having our agenda dictated to us by a power on high. The W3C director has a significant amount of power -- he approves the charter, chooses the staff rep for the WG, and can veto any spec before it goes to REC -- but he does not choose the WG membership or set its agenda, at least not when I was there. It is true that individuals in the WG had different priorities -- some of us wanted to work on query, some on infoset, etc. -- and that's why we did the reorg in August 1998, for better or for worse. I ended up chairing the XML Core WG for a few months, and experienced very little (if any) pressure from up high. > | Can you name anyone from the original XML WG who asked to be involved > | in the new XML plenary but was not allowed to be? > > That wasn't the point. The point was not asking at all. As in, give up > and move on. That's hardly the W3C's fault, though. Eliot Kimber quite the XML WG before the reorg, and Tim Bray, Jon Bosak, and I all left the XML Activity individually afterwards, but those were all personal choices, not departures orchestrated by the W3C. > No one is suggesting conspiracy theories. It's about how W3C Process > works. Some people get their way. Others may lie in the road for a > while, but usually they find better things to do. That's pretty much true of any work -- go to Slashdot and read about the internal politics of some of the big Open Source projects, which make the W3C look quite tame. All the best, David -- David Megginson, david@m..., http://www.megginson.com/
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