Re: [xml-dev] Recent allegations about me

• From: noah_mendelsohn@...
• To: Rick Marshall <rjm@...>
• Date: Mon, 29 Jan 2007 20:35:27 -0500

Rick Marshall writes:

> Why? Well now there's 2 document storage standards which is an 
> oxymoron. There is a standard or there isn't a 
> standard.

I think the folks who sell wrenches in standard metric sizes and those who 
sell in standard British sizes(is that what we still call them?) would be 
surprised to find out that one of their products was necessarily 
nonstandard after all, because surely there can be only one standard for 
wrench sizes.  I believe that EBCDIC and ASCII were and are both de facto 
and de jure standards to solve what is arguably the same problem.  There 
are lots of other examples.  Whatever the other merits of either OOXML or 
the other issues raised here regarding Wikipedia, I certainly think one 
can have what appear to be overlapping standards, in the sense that there 
are multiple standard solutions to the same or similar problem.  Whether 
OOXML in particular is in fact really a "standard", and if so in what 
senses (e.g. is it an open standard?) are questions I won't comment on 
here.

Noah

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Noah Mendelsohn 
IBM Corporation
One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
1-617-693-4036
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