Unless governments and other stakeholders can get beyond the
narrow view of documents and interoperability as merely being exchanging data
from one similar application to another, and move towards the view that
documents and web resources need to be end points on the same interoperable
spectrum, we are selling ourselves short.
It is here that standards bodies should be more help: but I
don't know that they can be unless there is a stronger commitment to supporting
each others' visions better. W3C's mission statement is concerned with bringing
the web to its full potential, and W3C have traditionally used this to justify shying
away from old-fashioned compound file-based issues: the lack of standards for
the *SP (JSP, ASP, PHP) class of documents is a symptom of this, and it is
notable that much of XML's uptake came because it did take care of practical
production issues (i.e. issues pertaining to the document as it existed before
being made available as a resource —PIs
and entities—and after
it had been retrieved—character
encodings.) The industry consortia such as ECMA and OASIS are organized
around interest groups on particular standards, which makes it easy to fob off
discussion of interoperability. And even ISO, where the availability are
topic-based working groups with very broad interests should provide a more
workable home for this kind of effort, have a strong disinclination to seek out
work that involves liaison with other standards groups: satisfying two sets of
procedures and fitting in with two sets of deadlines and timetables can be
impractical and disenfranchising for volunteers and small-business/academic experts.
