Skip to content
{ 2005 10 04 }

End of an Era

Now that the XML Cata­log spe­cific­a­tion has been approved as an OASIS Stand­ard, it feels like the end of an era to me. I’ve been chair­ing the Entity Res­ol­u­tion Tech­nical Com­mit­tee since its incep­tion way back in Octo­ber 2000 , work­ing with a good group of people. As Norm put it today, we’d be happy to work on any stand­ard with this group. Every­one work­ing together, no pos­tur­ing, no weird agen­das, just people try­ing to find the best solu­tion to a prob­lem. It made the group easy to chair, and I’m con­fid­ent the res­ults reflect that; I can’t help but sus­pect that dys­func­tional com­mit­tee polit­ics res­ults in spe­cific­a­tions that are not as good as they could have been.

So I’m a little nos­tal­gic right now, remem­ber­ing the first dis­cus­sions, the meet­ings at con­fer­ences, as well as the break we took in the middle before decid­ing to go for that “OASIS Stand­ard” moniker. The TC still has 3 of the ori­ginal 4 co-proposers (Norm Walsh, Paul Grosso, and me; John Cowan had to pull out part-way through due to work oblig­a­tions). New people joined, and oth­ers left, but over­all we had a pretty stable group.

So I want to thank the mem­bers of the ER TC, both past and present, and also Mary McRae and Robin Cover of OASIS. Your good humour, desire to do the right thing, and will­ing­ness to put in the effort all meant a lot and made it pos­sible to final­ize the spe­cific­a­tion and show mem­bers of OASIS why it’s use­ful. I’d also like to thank the imple­ment­ors of the cata­log spec who proved that it’s imple­ment­able! I believe cata­logs will be widely used in the future, even if, like much XML plumb­ing, people won’t actu­ally see a cata­log very often.

So feel free to drop by the Sun booth at XML 2005 to talk about cata­logs; either Norm or I are likely to be there and Norm will have his cata­log imple­ment­a­tion on his laptop to show people (along with a bunch of other things, of course).

Posted by Lauren Wood on Tuesday, October 4, 2005, at 9:41 am. Filed under Standards. You can post a comment or trackback from your blog.

{ 6 } Comments

  1. Derek K. Miller | Oct 04, 2005 at 11:20 am | Permalink

    Lauren, your link is mis-formatted at the begin­ning of the post. The sen­tence should read “Now that the XML Cata­log spe­cific­a­tion has been approved as an OASIS Stand­ard…” and it should link to:

    http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/members/200510/msg00001.html

    Looks like you missed a > bracket.

  2. Lauren Wood | Oct 04, 2005 at 11:22 am | Permalink

    Thanks for catch­ing that, it’s now fixed.

  3. John Cowan | Oct 04, 2005 at 1:59 pm | Permalink

    Actu­ally I left because my employer quit OASIS.

  4. Lauren Wood | Oct 04, 2005 at 2:01 pm | Permalink

    John, I figured your employer leav­ing OASIS fell into the cat­egory of “work oblig­a­tions”. I’m happy for you to tell the details, of course.

  5. John Cowan | Oct 05, 2005 at 8:28 am | Permalink

    There really aren’t any to speak of. After a dis­astrous 2002, Reuters’s first money-losing year since going pub­lic (pos­sibly its first in a century-and-a-half his­tory), Reu­ters bailed out of almost all the con­sor­tia and such that it belonged to, includ­ing Uni­code, OASIS, and W3C, in order to save money.

    Any­how, my work oblig­a­tions didn’t change. How­ever, Reu­ters is let­ting me go shortly (pos­sibly as soon as Decem­ber 31), so any leads to new employ­ment will be helpful.’

    BTW, I really really hate this instant pre­view mode; on a mod­er­ately slow machine like this one, it makes typ­ing really intol­er­able. I feel like I’m back on an over­loaded time­shar­ing sys­tem with up to seve­fral seconds’ declay dbe­fore I can see what I’m typ­ing. (I left the typos alone in that sen­tence to give you an idea.)

  6. Stephanie_B | Oct 25, 2005 at 10:18 am | Permalink

    Did any­body try XML 1.0 (Second Edition)???I’ve got some trable with an entity catalog …

{ 1 } Trackback

  1. kontrawize | Oct 04, 2005 at 2:14 pm | Permalink

    OASIS approves XML Cata­log 1.1

    OASIS has approved the XML Cata­log 1.1 spec. So, it is up to you all now to go out and use it. I hope a lot of you will find it use­ful (many already find the 1.0 spec use­ful, and

Post a Comment

Your email is never published nor shared. Required fields are marked *