Standards or not ?

[Christoph Cullmann]

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On Friday 24 January 2003 22:31, Andreas Pour wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Just a short point about standards:  you use the term a lot but do not
> define it.  What you seem to mean by "standard" is "the draft specification
> developed by w3c.org", then you are using:
>
>   * a completely undemocratic organization
>   * an organization which seriously considered making standards subject to
> an individual's monopoly (i.e., requiring royalty payments), with these
> individuals having great influence over what is a "standard" or not (i.e. a
> huge conflict of interest, not to mention likely anti-trust violations and
> other criminal behavior)
>   * a specification which is nowhere implemented so if you create s
> standards-compliant webpage, surprise, it is very much possible that
> *nobody* can use it
>
> If that is your def'n of "standard", then I pass on standards, thank you
> very much.

Perhaps you don't like the w3c, that is your good right. It is true, that this 
organisation is not really the open democratic and free group we could want 
to have, but it is true, too, that: The whole web only works because their 
standards are (nearly) respected. What would we do without their 
HTML/XHTML/XML/RDF/CSS/... specs ? There would be NO open source browser and 
there would be NO real www if this specs wouldn't exist. KDE wouldn't be able 
to use XML, as it wouldn't exist (and if it would exist, it would be surely 
not open for common use).

That some of their future plans for allowing of "royalty payments" and so on 
for new stuff with which companies can come up and so on is bad, yes, but to 
say: "Ignore their standards" ingnores the current real world situtation.

In short: the kde.org page should keep on to conform to the w3c specifications 
instead of trying to start to conform to browsers which don't implement them 
right.

cu
Christoph

- -- 
Christoph Cullmann
KDE Developer, kde.org Co-Maintainer
http://www.babylon2k.de, cullmann at kde.org
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