>  At the end of Walter Perry's presentation last night, C. Michael 
>  Sperberg-McQueen suggested that Walter was describing a "Hobbesian world of 
>  processes in competition...each process for itself", while for himself, 
>  "call me a corporatist", he preferred to work with processes based on prior 
>  agreement.

Hmm.  This seems to be a distortion of Hobbes.  The divine right of kings is 
hardly a free market.  Also, I don't see how Hobbesian philosophy precludes 
agreement.

But on to the technical point...


>  After too many years of working with web browsers, which share a common 
>  agreement to some extent but which still have dark corners, I know that I'm 
>  inclined to doubt the prospects of large-scale distributed projects run by 
>  competitors proving genuinely willing to abide by the terms of the 
>  contract.  Contracts in the United States often start with the best of 
>  intentions, but but sometimes turn into battlegrounds, specifying the terms 
>  of engagement in a more bellicose style than was originally intended.
>  
>  I'm curious at this point how the "XML project" of agreement-building is 
>  proceeding.  In most of my own work, I find that either I don't bother with 
>  contracts (my own rules files, which others have been able to adapt to 
>  their own needs) or the contracts sort of partially work (HTML, DocBook at 
>  O'Reilly).
>  
>  Are most people working on building agreements across communities?  Are 
>  they working on the I-publish-you-discover approach common to smaller 
>  efforts and formalized by things like WSDL and (to a lesser extent) RDDL?

The approach I've seen work in projects of mine is: I suggest, you tweak, we 
both decide whether to try to merge the ideas, or whether to keep separate and 
use our transformations to sanitize the incoming XML.  This is sort of a mix 
between ad-hoc and agreed.  I don't see it as a mutually exclusive choice.


-- 
Uche Ogbuji                                    Fourthought, Inc.
http://uche.ogbuji.net    http://4Suite.org    http://fourthought.com
Track chair, XML/Web Services One Boston: http://www.xmlconference.com/
Basic XML and RDF techniques for knowledge management, Part 7 - 
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-think12.html
Keeping pace with James Clark - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/libra
ry/x-jclark.html
Python and XML development using 4Suite, Part 3: 4RDF - 
http://www-105.ibm.com/developerworks/education.nsf/xml-onlinecourse-bytitle/8A
1EA5A2CF4621C386256BBB006F4CEC



-----------------------------------------------------------------
The xml-dev list is sponsored by XML.org <http://www.xml.org> , an
initiative of OASIS <http://www.oasis-open.org> 

The list archives are at http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/

To subscribe or unsubscribe from this list use the subscription
manager: <http://lists.xml.org/ob/adm.pl>