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May 31, 1999

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Join The Standards Debate

By Jason Levitt

omputing standards isn't a sexy topic. But a poorly written standard can mean wasted development time and a costly loss of productivity. Would you try to influence the creation of a standard if you could?

My first experience with the creation of a computing standard was on the IEEE Posix security standards committee in the late 1980s. Representatives from major Unix vendors, including Digital Equipment, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Sun Microsystems, got together every few months and argued over insomnia-curing details, such as how many levels of security should be included in an access-control list.

The stakes were high; future versions of Unix software products would depend on the standards. The same is true for standards being hashed out today in committees such as those run by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). With the Internet poised to transform many brick-and-mortar stores into electronic-commerce engines, it's no wonder the process of creating standards is becoming more public and hotly contested than ever.

The debate on XML.com (www.xml.com), an Extensible Markup Language informational site, is a case in point. Under fire is the emerging Extensible Style Language, a possible standard for applying formats to XML documents. No one doubts XML's value or that it's rapidly becoming the basis for much business-to-business E-commerce data interchange, but some say XSL isn't needed.

Michael Leventhal, founder of Text Science, argues against XSL on XML.com, saying a combination of current W3C standards--Cascading Style Sheets 1 and 2, and Document Object Model Level 1--can do everything that XSL will do, and that vendors should be focusing on implementing all of CSS2 in their Web browsers so users and developers can experience the full power of the CSS+DOM combination.

Instead, work on XSL has caused confusion among developers and vendors, and foot-dragging within the standards committee. The XSL draft standard has already changed substantially in the past six months, which means Microsoft's partial implementation of XSL draft standards in Internet Explorer 5 will be incompatible with the final standard--if one ever emerges.

The process of creating standards has never been warm and friendly, but just remember that today's standards could be tomorrow's extra three months added to a release schedule. XML.com has opened one standards debate, complete with a chat forum. Maybe your arguments can make a difference.