April 11, 2006
@ 11:55 PM
Comments [8]
W3C Publishes XMLHttpRequest Object specification

I just noticed that last week the W3C published a working draft specification for The XMLHttpRequest Object. I found the end of the working draft somewhat interesting. Read through the list of references and authors of the specifcation below

References

This section is normative

DOM3
Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 Core Specification, Arnaud Le Hors (IBM), Philippe Le Hégaret (W3C), Lauren Wood (SoftQuad, Inc.), Gavin Nicol (Inso EPS), Jonathan Robie (Texcel Research and Software AG), Mike Champion (Arbortext and Software AG), and Steve Byrne (JavaSoft).
RFC2119
Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels, S. Bradner.
RFC2616
Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1, R. Fielding (UC Irvine), J. Gettys (Compaq/W3C), J. Mogul (Compaq), H. Frystyk (W3C/MIT), L. Masinter (Xerox), P. Leach (Microsoft), and T. Berners-Lee (W3C/MIT).

B. Authors

This section is informative

The authors of this document are the members of the W3C Web APIs Working Group.

  • Robin Berjon, Expway (Working Group Chair)
  • Ian Davis, Talis Information Limited
  • Gorm Haug Eriksen, Opera Software
  • Marc Hadley, Sun Microsystems
  • Scott Hayman, Research In Motion
  • Ian Hickson, Google
  • Björn Höhrmann, Invited Expert
  • Dean Jackson, W3C
  • Christophe Jolif, ILOG
  • Luca Mascaro, HTML Writers Guild
  • Charles McCathieNevile, Opera Software
  • T.V. Raman, Google
  • Arun Ranganathan, AOL
  • John Robinson, AOL
  • Doug Schepers, Vectoreal
  • Michael Shenfield, Research In Motion
  • Jonas Sicking, Mozilla Foundation
  • Stéphane Sire, IntuiLab
  • Maciej Stachowiak, Apple Computer
  • Anne van Kesteren, Opera Software

Thanks to all those who have helped to improve this specification by sending suggestions and corrections. (Please, keep bugging us with your issues!)

Interesting. A W3C specification that documents a proprietary Microsoft API which not only does not include a Microsoft employee as a spec author but doesn't even reference any of the IXMLHttpRequest documentation on MSDN.

I'm sure there's a lesson in there somewhere. ;)


 

Categories: Web Development | XML
Tracked by:
"W3C Publishes XMLHTTPObject specification" (Paresh Suthar's Radio Weblog) [Trackback]
"W3C에서 써준 마이크로소프트 문서?" (bkchung's WebLog) [Trackback]
http://blogs.msdn.com/bkchung/archive/2006/05/16/597992.aspx [Pingback]
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Wednesday, 12 April 2006 12:12:40 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Impressive indeed...

Since it's a RFC (something like "Request For Comments", no ?), I assume there's a way to post... comments about this completely new, very innovative work ?

Just to tell the authors that they may, should or must (choose a suitable rfc-verb here) quote Microsoft as a reference...


Has Microsoft become such a black sheep in the Internet flock to deserve this level of gratitude for its work ?
Buz
Wednesday, 12 April 2006 17:10:06 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Perhaps the question should be why no-one from MS (W3C members, no?) chose to join the Web APIs WG.
Danny
Wednesday, 12 April 2006 18:07:11 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
... and 3 Opera employees! Not bad for a ~250 man company based all the way up in Norway. ;)
Vetle
Wednesday, 12 April 2006 18:27:02 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Danny,

That would explain the lack of MS authors, but not the lack of proper reference and attribution. I think the WG screwed up pretty badly here, and not having any MS members is no excuse.
Uche Ogbuji
Thursday, 13 April 2006 13:32:41 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Uche, yep, ok, there certainly should have been some attribution, and I guess the MSDN docs could have been included as informative references.
Danny
Friday, 14 April 2006 16:47:53 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
It is actually even worse than the above description, as they specifically thank the WHAT-WG individual:

"This specification was originally derived from the WHAT WG's Web Applications 1.0 document."

Who undoubtedly did a lot of useful work, but it was still done by building on top of the original MS work.
Jim Ley
Monday, 15 May 2006 15:44:11 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
[quote]
Perhaps the question should be why no-one from MS (W3C members, no?) chose to join the Web APIs WG.
[/quote]

Or, a better question, why didn't MS submit the draft spec themselves. To me it's part of a pattern.
jeff
Monday, 15 May 2006 19:49:08 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
One of the authors has already apologized:
http://annevankesteren.nl/2006/05/attribution

The list of authors is incorrect as well.

Never attribute to malice...
Joe W.
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