W3 Consortium, was Re: Standards Article

Roger Debreceny (rogerd@netbox.com)
Thu, 9 Oct 1997 16:33:49 +0800

>
>At 10:13 AM 8/10/97 +1000, Rachel Polanskis wrote:
>
>>...I would have thought w3.org *was* the "formal" standards body for
>>HTML/XML etc...

And Tom W said:
>
>As far as I know W3C is an industry forum and doesn't have formal status
>with ISO.
>

As I understand the situation, Tim Berners-Lee and the W3 Consortium made
the deliberate decision *not* to proceed thru the ISO, as the time taken at
the ISO was considerably longer than the half life of a W3C "standard". I
guess we've worked with RFCs for many years and who's heard of being
governed by a standard which is a "Request for Comment", for goodness sake!
<g>

Roger Debreceny