{"id":114,"date":"2003-04-16T06:44:00","date_gmt":"2003-04-16T10:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/wp\/?p=199"},"modified":"2003-04-16T06:44:00","modified_gmt":"2003-04-16T10:44:00","slug":"oasis-versus-the-w3c","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/2003\/04\/oasis-versus-the-w3c\/","title":{"rendered":"OASIS versus the W3C"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.docuverse.com\/blog\/donpark\/2003\/04\/15.html#a415\">Don Park writes<\/a><\/p>\n\n<blockquote>\nOASIS is now looking at a lionshare of key specs that will dominate the Internet and intranets in the near future.  Compared to them, W3C is looking pretty devastated [with disinterest and hopeless dreams] at this point.\n<\/blockquote>\n\n<p>I&#8217;ve heard that from a number of people over the past couple of years, but I just\ndon&#8217;t see it that way.  Yes, certainly the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\">W3C<\/a> has been\ntaking lots of slack from lots of folks who think that Web services are some wonderful\nnew thing, both inside (from W3C members), and out (press).  But there&#8217;s much more at\nplay here than that.<\/p>\n\n<p>The <em>fundamental<\/em> difference between <a href=\"http:\/\/www.oasis-open.org\">OASIS<\/a>\nand the W3C, is that the W3C exists to maintain and enhance an existing software system, while\nOASIS does not.  OASIS&#8217;s approach resembles little more than a random land grab, attempting to\nstake out territory without any consideration for its inherent value.  Take Don&#8217;s list of\nspecs, for example; SAML, XACML, Liberty, BPEL4WS.  There is effectively <em>no<\/em>\narchitectural consistency at all between those specs, so the chances of them ever\nworking well together as part of a single system (without considerable effort) are pretty\ndarned low.  And that&#8217;s without even considering that I don&#8217;t think they will see much\nwidespread deployment individually (though SAML and XACML aren&#8217;t too bad).<\/p>\n\n<p>Thinking back over the recent history of influential software standards related\norganizations such as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.omg.org\">OMG<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ietf.org\">IETF<\/a>,\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\">W3C<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/wapforum.org\">WAPforum\/OMA<\/a>, etc..\nthe only other one that I can think of that didn&#8217;t have a legacy system or architecture to\nprotect is the Opengroup (though the OSF had DCE).  The others <em>all<\/em> had some\nmeans of ensuring architectural consistency.  The IETF has the\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.iesg.org\/iesg.html\">IESG<\/a> and\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.iesg.org\/html.charters\/wg-dir.html\">Areas<\/a> for constraining work.  The OMG created the\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.omg.org\/news\/about\/ab.htm\">Architecture Board<\/a>.  The WAPforum had an\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.wapforum.org\/who\/approved_charters\/pdfcharters\/Architecture%20Consistency%20Group%20Charter.PDF\">Architectural Consistency<\/a>\ngroup.  And the W3C has Activities, Staff, the Director, and more recently, the\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2001\/tag\/\">TAG<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n<p>So if OASIS wants to go\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.opengroup.org\/certification\/\">the way of the Opengroup<\/a>,\nthey&#8217;re certainly on track.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Don Park writes OASIS is now looking at a lionshare of key specs that will dominate the Internet and intranets in the near future. Compared to them, W3C is looking pretty devastated [with disinterest and hopeless dreams] at this point. I&#8217;ve heard that from a number of people over the past couple of years, but [&hellip;]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[34],"class_list":["post-114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-w3c"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=114"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}