August 16, 2005

Standards Bodies? Come on, we don't really need standards, do we?

Microsoft exec defends RSS rebranding | InfoWorld | News | 2005-08-15 | By Elizabeth Montalbano, IDG News Service

USB, CD, DVD, HTML, XML, RSS 1.x/RDF, RSS 2.0, Atom

All of these except for one belong on this list. Can you guess which one?

[Hint 1: Standards Bodies]

[Hint 2:

"In the end I think they'll do the right thing [with the technology]," Winer said of Microsoft's RSS rebranding moves in an e-mail to the IDG News Service. "I also don't think we need a standards body. RSS happened outside of the standards bodies for good reasons."

And look what happened to it. (Separation of RSS 1.x, RSS 2.0, broken publishing extensions, a joke for an outlining standard (to name a few))

The next comment is killing me:

Jupiter's Wilcox agreed. "As long as there’s a standard everyone can agree on, it doesn’t matter much who the steward is," he said.

And how do they agree on a standard? They form a "standards body."

Do these people live in a bubble?

Here's a suggestion: If you don't define a specification as a standard and furthermore get a common standards group like the W3C, or the IETF, or IEEE(allowing room for the fact that software is only half the computing equation), etc... then don't get all pissed off when people decide to make changes to it that conform to their own needs. What are we, in Kindergarten?

"That's my ball, give it back!!!! You can't touch it. THIS ISN'T FAIR!!! WAAAHAHAHHAAHHAHA"

Hmmm, interesting.... Could someone please change the channel?

Ahhhhhh... thats much better. Thanks!