"Simon St.Laurent" wrote:
> 
> Which, of course, raises the question of why people who are locked out of
> the discussions should be inclined to have much faith in the decisions
> arrived at in those discussions.

Users ceded control of their standards from organizations they could
control -- such as the IETF and ISO -- to organizations that they could
not -- such as the W3C. Users confer legitimacy just on standards
organizations just as they do on governments. Presumably, they trust these
organizations.

Luckily, a determined and interested group of users can make their own
standards: we've already seen that with SGML (ISO) and WebDAV (IETF) and
even XML-DEV (SAX). The only problem is that more advanced standards are
incredibly expensive to create.

 Paul Prescod  - ISOGEN Consulting Engineer speaking for only himself
 http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco

"Are the social and economic benefits of capital punishment sufficient
to outweigh the injustice of accidentally executing innocents?"
"What benefits???"


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