Setting the Standard
by Liora Alschuler
|
Pages: 1, 2, 3
New Economy Players
So, who is actually writing high-tech standards today? Apart from those organizations affiliated with ANSI, who share some common structure and commitment to open governance and process, there are many smaller, ad hoc and formal organizations with no affiliation, and no stated intention of coming under the umbrella of ANSI (or anyone else). These bodies range from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to OASIS to the team of David Megginson and XML-DEV, who wrote and maintain the Simple API for XML (SAX).
The W3C was created in 1994 to foster Web standards. Today, it has more than 50 researchers and engineers working at the three host agencies: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA); and Keio University. Structured as a research organization, the primary constituency of the W3C are its corporate members, who pay most of the freight. (See "W3C and the Web Community.")
The Organization for Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) is also member-supported, but OASIS honors individual membership and participation as well as corporate sponsorship. OASIS is not an R&D organization, although it has increased its staffing since taking on the ebXML and xml.org initiatives.
And then there is the no-organization organization of XML-DEV and SAX, and similar projects including early VRML. Briefly, Megginson is the progenitor and maintainer of SAX, and responds to the open constituency of the XML-DEV mailing list. The debate on XML-DEV over maintenance of SAX (see archives "Democracy and the Future of SAX, 2/9/00-2/16/00, and Jon Bosak’s post, "SAX, OASIS, &c." 2/22/2000, available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/threads.html) and again in the article on OASIS published here. He touched on the core issues of who should write standards, who should maintain them, and how those bodies are best constituted. In urging that future development of SAX be handed to a formal body such as OASIS, Bosak asserted that only a democratic process could insulate the standards process from the pressure of the marketplace.
The adequacy of the W3C process comes under frequent review on XML.com, with critics citing the exclusion of non-corporate, non-institutional members. Some promote in its place the loose, informal process that currently maintains SAX. On the feasibility of safeguarding a standard in an ad hoc organization, Bosak wrote on XML-DEV:
It is possible to operate this way only in the absence of concrete economic interests in proposed features of the specification. The artistic climate in which this group has been operating won't last when subjected to the stresses of big competitive investments in the outcomes of certain decisions.
Having toiled in the vineyards of SGML and related standards for close to a decade before taking on the mantle of "SGML for the Web" from Yuri Rubinsky, Bosak knows of what he speaks. He continued:
In the absence of a democratic process, SAX will be defined by companies like Sun and IBM that build it into their products. The first time that IBM makes a change to their version of SAX, the opinions of this group [xml-dev] cease to be relevant. The notion that you are somehow in control of what happens to SAX under the current arrangement is completely illusory. What I'm suggesting is that the group that developed SAX take actual control of it in a way that prevents it from being stolen out from under you.
These are plain words that I expect will be heeded. The proposal was met not so much with push-back as with reluctance to adopt known models with perceived faults. Simon St. Laurent wrote:
I hope that SAX remains tightly connected to the community of developers who have created it, and that the ever-growing need for interoperability, that often-taken-for-granted aspect of all XML development, is enough to keep the legal departments and vendor consortia out of the picture.
The underlying tension in these discussions is the knowledge that if non-commercial organizations, of whatever stripe, fail to produce standards that are accepted by the marketplace, we will have vendor-controlled protocols in place of standards. The market needs interoperability, and if the only way to get it is to climb on some commercially driven bandwagon, big fish and small fish alike will do so, however uncomfortable it may prove.
What We Need
We know that we must have formal superstructure and we know that it must follow well-defined procedures. If we accept the need for a time-tested procedural guide with a modern update to define technical committees, we are still something short of the required mix. Successful standards-writing needs the following:
- support staff
- technical experts with domain experience
- technical experts with implementation experience
- professional technical writers (ignore the redundancy here)
- the community of interest (some open channel representing the interests of the full spectrum of those who will be affected by the new standard)
There is a further element, less tangible, which nevertheless can’t be overlooked. A high percentage of the standards that have influenced our industry (in a positive way) to-date had at least partial parentage in research and development, or through a concerted effort that was funded and shielded from requirements other than to produce new intellectual property. Tim Berners-Lee wrote HTML while solving problems for a research institution, a fact that undoubtedly influenced the design of the W3C.
While the administration of the HIPAA standards effort has been conscientious and well-intentioned, one has to question whether the qualities that make a good civil servant also make a good technical leader. Avoidance of risk is important in the civil service, but does not foster innovation, even when innovation is the order of the day. In an ideal world, regulatory agencies would set requirements, and technical standards would be the transparent means to fulfillment.
There is no failsafe recipe for innovation, but we do know that if you can’t afford the ingredients and your chef has to train new volunteer staff each day, you won’t get the results you are looking for.
