End of an Era

 Standards  7 Responses »
Oct 042005
 

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).

Friday the 13th

 Standards, Technology  Comments Off on Friday the 13th
May 162005
 

I spent a cer­tain pro­por­tion of Fri­day morn­ing watch­ing the web­cast of the Scott and Steve show — the update of the col­lab­or­a­tion work that Microsoft and Sun star­ted a year ago. Lots of oth­er people have blogged about what was shown and the implic­a­tions (try Tim, Eve, Pat, Robin, Greg and Jonath­an for some dif­fer­ing Sun views; CNET, The Register, and Slash­dot for some out­side-Sun views).

I had a spe­cial interest in watch­ing the demo (starts at 17:19) as I did the CSS for the Sun part. What happened was, I’m new to all this iden­tity man­age­ment stuff, and asked wheth­er I could help in pre­par­ing the demo for the eGov for­um at the Liberty Alli­ance meet­ing in Dub­lin in April, in part to help me try to get the con­cepts straight. Pat said the inter­face to the demo could do with some work; I took a CSS that I’d done for my blog (really must move it into WP 1.5 format some time to reuse it!), spiffed it up a bit, and voila! a CSS cus­tom-built for iden­tity man­age­ment demos. So it made sense for me to con­tin­ue spiff­ing up the demos for this press event. Unfor­tu­nately you only see about 2 seconds of the actu­al demo on the web­cast and it’s pretty blurry (the web­cast shows more of the demo presenters than the demo they were present­ing), but Pat assures me it looked great on the big screens in real life.

I took what I’d done for the eGov for­um, made some changes to make sure it would work on IE 6 on Win­dows XP as well as the JDS browser on Sol­ar­is (which, being basic­ally Moz­illa, does­n’t have the CSS “incon­sist­en­cies” that IE 6 has) and then pinched the col­ours from the new Sun brand­ing. Pat sug­ges­ted using some of the Sun images to add some piza­zz to the site, while Tim made the fake com­pany logos. 

Joint demo devel­op­ment takes a lot of coordin­a­tion. We dis­cussed small things like which logos we should show (we settled on Sun + Sol­ar­is / Microsoft + Win­dows) as well as big things like the pre­cise script that would be used, which defined how many links should be act­ive, and how many dif­fer­ent web pages each com­pany needed to pre­pare, which determ­ined how much cod­ing needed to be done. And a bunch of oth­er stuff, of course. We had daily phone calls with­in the Sun demo team, and daily phone calls with the Microsoft demo team, just to nail down all those little details.

In the end, we got there, the demo looked good and worked, and, I hope, made sense to people. Spiffy CSS or fancy images aren’t much use if people don’t get what’s being demon­strated. The write-ups I’ve seen indic­ate that they did. 

Dublin Liberty

 General, Standards, Travel  Comments Off on Dublin Liberty
May 102005
 

I was lucky enough to be able to attend the Liberty spon­sor meet­ing in Dub­lin, a couple of weeks ago. I’ve been to Dub­lin before, in October/November 2003, to assist in the Reach PSB Phase 1 pro­cure­ment, and I like the city, so I was glad to get back again, even if it was only three days. Three days is enough time to get to a couple of decent res­taur­ants and a Dub­lin pub (these being upstairs at the Chamele­on Indone­sian res­taur­ant, upstairs again at the Mer­cant­ile pub, and down in the cel­lar at the Thai Papaya res­taur­ant). There was anoth­er res­taur­ant but that was on the first, jet­lagged, night, so I’ve for­got­ten the name. Of course, no vis­it to Dub­lin would be com­plete without the end­less trek through Heath­row Air­port (see Tim’s exeges­is on Heath­row); for­tu­nately this time the escal­at­ors worked and the air­port was mostly empty so the lines for secur­ity and buses were much short­er. My weak knee also decided to be kind to me and not play up so I guess the new Pil­ates exer­cises I have are doing some good!

Back on top­ic… Dub­lin seems to have a lot of old bank build­ings that have been nicely revamped to be pubs (the Mer­cant­ile above) and hotels (the West­in, where the meet­ing was held) but maybe that’s just the way it appears when you first notice the phe­nomen­on. Unlike in many cit­ies where banks were taken over for oth­er uses, the Dub­liners don’t try to hide the her­it­age of the build­ings. I still remem­ber the first McDon­ald’s in Auck­land, New Zea­l­and, which was also in an old bank build­ing. They did a good job there as well (undoubtedly assisted by some loc­al by-laws for­cing the issue), so it is pos­sible to reuse old build­ings and keep the her­it­age aspects con­gru­ent with the new uses.

I’m new to the Liberty meet­ings, so I’m still learn­ing who’s who and how the sys­tem works. Com­pared to W3C and OASIS there appeared to be more Europeans and Japan­ese, and more women. The former makes tim­ing phone calls tricky (Europe, North Amer­ica, Japan pretty much span the globe); the lat­ter enables a cer­tain amount of knit­ting and needle­craft to go on dur­ing the dis­cus­sions (as well, of course, as the typ­ic­al email­ing that always goes on dur­ing meet­ings). The work is done in a slightly dif­fer­ent way to OASIS and W3C. There are a num­ber of dif­fer­ent groups in the Liberty Alli­ance (see Liberty Alli­ance Activ­it­ies) which share the work. So, for example, instead of one tech­nic­al com­mit­tee doing everything from dis­cuss­ing use cases to design­ing the tech­nic­al solu­tion as hap­pens in W3C and OASIS, the Busi­ness & Mar­ket­ing Expert Group comes up with the use cases (the mar­ket require­ments) and the Tech­no­logy Expert Group cre­ates the spe­cific­a­tions to meet those require­ments and sat­is­fy those use cases. This is an inter­est­ing way to split up the work; it seems to work well (syn­chron­iz­a­tion between the two Expert Groups is a neces­sary part of the pro­cess, of course). Over­all, a good crowd of people with lots of tech­nic­al and mar­ket know­ledge about import­ant prob­lems; this is going to be a fun part of my job at Sun.

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