Page IV: A growing roster of de facto standards is testing the need for bureaucratic agencies and design-by-committee technologies.
Winer said he's investigated submitting RSS to one of several standards bodies but worries that the "really simple" part of RSS might be comprised by overeager developers.
"The problem is that a number of these organisations don't want to just take something and ratify it -- they want to create something and ratify it," he said.
Winer's reluctance to submit RSS to a standards body and insistence on freezing the specification have attracted growing criticism from some blogging interests, who'd like a more tricked-out blogging format. The result has been growing support from Google and others for the "Atom" format under development and intended for submissions to a standards body.
Bray said it's wrong to cast Atom as a direct rival. "The view that there's some sort of war between RSS and Atom is silly," he said. "RSS is widely deployed and it will continue to do a fine job of meeting a lot of people's needs. For new applications, Atom is going to be a sweet spot for some applications where people want more strictly structured data."
Still, it would help to have RSS established as an open standard, Bray said. "I don't think it would have been smart to put RSS through a standards process before now," he said. "But I think we're mature enough to write down the rules now."
The debate over RSS illustrates the classic debate over standardisation. What's to gain by subjecting already popular technologies to a long, sometimes painful standards process? Ultimately, the protection that standards provide to consumers that one company's products will work with another's.
"At the end of the day," Bray said, "the best way to ensure interoperation between technologies is by adhering to an open standards process. By default, I think standardisation should be the process. If a new technology doesn't want to be standardised, it should prove why."
O'Grady said there are valid objections to be made about how standards bodies work. But there are few substitutions. "We hear a lot of complaints about standards bodies, but I've yet to hear someone come up with a better way to do it.
"It ultimately ends up hurting everybody when you don't have a uniform standard," he said.
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