> And how does that become a standard? What we have here is our own interpretations of the word "standard". If I were to make a fictitious language of my own; and if I would write documentation describing the semantics of that language; that's a standard. It may not be popular in the sense of other people adopting it; but any compiler that conforms to my semantics automatically conforms to my "standard".
> What makes a standard a standard is how well it's description helps in > creating working tools by perusing that standard. Document standards > was neccessitated by the need to allow interoperabilty. OOXML > essentially describes how to enclose binary blobs, while saying > nothing about the blob itself, which is the center of the > interoperability problem. I never said OOXML wasn't crap. I only said that .NET is a proper standard. The ECMA .NET specification, unlike OOXML, describes in detail the language itself and provides all the necessary information to create working tools. Which is why Mono was made possible in the first place. Again, .NET is an ECMA standard; complete with a reference implementation. If you consider JavaScript to be a standard, there's no reason why .NET isn't. >> There's only one proper implementation of an XHTML 1.1 based >> browser. It's still a standard, is it not? > > It's not. Not until someone writes an implementation as per the > standards documentation. As far as I am concerned it still is. Because I can make web pages that comply to XHTML 1.1 and validate them with W3C's validator. Whether or not the end-user will be able to view the web pages as XHTML 1.1 intended them to be viewed is not my problem. -- Anant -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
