In the continuing discussion over XHTML's
return to committee,
David
Megginson suggests
a
Socialist/Libertarian dichotomy exists in the
regulation of WWW standards.
He goes on to argue that there is a risk in the
W3C's policy of
creating standards before implementations
exist:
"Now that we're trying to standardize in
advance of implementation,
we run an enormous risk of messing up: our
industry simply lacks any
real, large-scale implementation experience to
guide the process, so
we're just publishing our own wild speculations
and stamping them as
W3C Recommendations or ISO standards or
what-have-you."
Megginson suggests that a solution is to
standardize incrementally,
in order to strike a balance between the cost of
standardization and the
benefits it brings.