Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: W3C

Author:Ross Nelson
Posted:1/13/1999; 3:58:36 AM
Topic:HTML Refresh Language
Msg #:2076 (In response to 2072)
Prev/Next:2075 / 2077

Dear Dave.

Thanks for the reply post. Yes W3C drove me nuts with no response for about 3 weeks. I tried their "public notes" (?) submission method and 3 weeks later go an email to say we dont accept these no more!

IETF on the other hand was real helpful (maximum points to whoever mans their rfc-editor email address) and said that EXPERIMENTAL RFC was the way to go, less waves over into the W3C camp (whose baliwick is all www related spec things) I guess.

The line between W3C and IETF seems a bit blured as well to the outsider. I think IETF does more coms and coms protocols and W3C does HTTP, HTTPS (I guess), HTML, SGML and other www things. Its probably on their web pages somwhere.

I guess given its pricing structure W3C just doesnt want to deal with the smaller organisation and individuals, just larger corporates and educationals. I can understand this to keep the idiots out, but some form of limited individual membership that costs say 500 $US - 1000 $US a year would be nice.

This sort of membership could have limited submission rights and some limited entitlements. Somebody please let me know if this is going to happen!

A real pity that joining is so expensive as I think that startups and dedicated industry professionals are where a lot of good ideas come from, mainly because they have current, real life coal face experince to draw on and forge concepts and ideas with. They are also usually not constrained as much by big corporate structures.

By the by, where did the WDDX idea come from? I heard Allaire were in it somehow but I havent looked at it fully yet. The weird thing is we (i.e. the WAX group) looked at something like this back in 1996 sometime, but didnt go past the whiteboard stage and we just stuck to sending data over the www in a CSV format and using text/plain mime types. WDDX sounds a great soloution.

Just to divert onto WDDX for a moment and a pet idea of mine:

I see a posibility in the future where someone like an airline for instance would have a web server cgi url available that would take several query parameters and return flight/seat availability info in WDDX format.

All programmers need to do then is embed code in say an organiser program to issue a web request and decypher the WDDX comming back and incorporate into a gui tabular display. This would be real easy nowdays in something like VB6.

The vertical marketing possiblities are enourmous. Several airlines could agree (as if, but I'm on a roll...) and have servers which support similar query URL's and WDDX response formats. This I see opening up a huge new area, E-DATA, and E-DATA integration into existing software products (i.e. SAP).

We will probably look at putting higher level WDDX support in our WAX product in the next major release. 10 Points to the guys who thought it up.

Cheers Ross Nelson

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