On Monday 05 February 2007 21:26, Anant Narayanan wrote:
What exactly do you mean by "open". The standards are encumbered by patents. And the Microvell deal is aimed at non paying users of M$ patents. Does Mono violate M$ patents?. To be sure u would have to higher a lawyer and do a patent search. And according to Miguel De Icaza he does not know of any possible violations. But of late he does not seem to know a lot more. Recently he tried justifying the OOXML ECMA standards. His argument was that there was nothing wrong with yet another standard. Which completely missed the point that OOXML was not a standard but an incorrect and incomplete description of a single implemetation of MSoffice blobs. A standard is one when it has more than one independent implementation for starters.
Not true. Anybody is free to make a "standard" of their own.
And how does that become a standard?
Of course, what makes a standard "stand out" depends on how popular it is and how many implementations of it are out there.
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.
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.