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Here's a good article illustrating how "standards" get a bad reputation given people who know a lot about code and little about the kinds of agreements standards should provide. http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/ws-samruby.html?ca=dnt-424 "Ruby: So what we decided to do was, instead, open source it, and say, "Here is a ubiquitous, in essence de facto reference implementation." It's not anointed as a reference implementation, but it achieves the same purpose. It's our way of increasing the probability that this implementation of a standard is adopted." That's not standardization; that's marketing. Standards don't have meaning on the web related to initial agreements about the technology. Maybe we should stop pretending they do. Specifications create a technology that spawns a market; standards get the costs down for selling to that market, and ideally that cost should be just a little above zero, essentially, the cost of marking the 'yes' slots in the RFP response. len
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