Re: Looking toward the IETF meeting

Albert Lunde (Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu)
Tue, 29 Nov 94 20:44:11 EST

At 2:45 PM 11/29/94 -0500, Daniel W. Connolly wrote:
>The HTML 2.0 document has missed its marked window, in my
>opinion. When I started this effort, I had hoped that HTML 2.0 is what
>all the vendors would use in their marketing stuff and documentation.
>It would be the common feature set among the commercial
>implementations.
[...]
>1. Continue to edit the 2.0 document until all the little nits are
>hammered out. Sort through the boat-load of documents resulting from
>the Internet Draft released in San Jose, looking for those few
>comments actually in the 2.0 scope among the zillions of enhancement
>requests.
>
>We end up with a nice, neat specification of a language that some
>browsers sort of supported about six months ago.

Having a nice neat specification is not something to sneeze at. IMHO,
writing quick-and-dirty specs (and never polishing them up) is one of the
problems of the gopher and gopher+ protocol.

An open standards group is likely to "keep missing the window" of
commercial development because there is so much pressure to live up to the
hype. And I wouldn't be surprised if be see more stuff put into production
and then the spec put into a standards process. There is some tension
between being the first in the market with feature X and having
interoperability.

---
    Albert Lunde                      Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu