Speaking as for myself (but as a minor member of the IETF HTML working
group), it seems to me that the chief tension may not be from "proprietary"
interests as such, but just the rush to get things to market.
(One of the particular issues in standardizing HTML has been making
everything in the standard fit within the framework of SGML.)
I'd guess that "dotting the i's and crossing the t's" added six months
to getting the HTML 2.0 specfication complete. (Some significant
issues did get addressed at the same time: including a framework
for international character set support and work on the actual
parts of what was the HTML 3 draft.)
We need "cowboy programmers" to implement wild ideas, and we need
"syntax lawyers" to specify protocols for true interoperability.
There is a tradeoff between product differentiation and interoperability,
and between speed to market and rigor of specification.
I'd say that the majority of sucessful internet protocols today
started out with a few freely/widely available implemenations,
each of which may have been largely the work of a single programmer
(or sometimes a series of programmers).
But the job of making it all work together, of finding the bugs,
and polishing off the rough edges, is a complex colaborative social
enterprise, for which the Internet is both the tool and the end-product.
----
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Talk with Mary Morris on Tuesday, Oct. 10, at 4 pm Pacific/7 pm Eastern
over the Internet using GlobalStage/GlobalChat software. See
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