abcoatesecure-xmldev@y... wrote:

>Beyond that, there is only one similarly strong brand,
>and that is Apache.  Developers can usually make a
>case to use the latest Xerces or Xalan because the
>Apache name is so strong.  Xerces supports DOM, not
>JDOM nor XDOM, and that is what it comes down to.
>  
>
I wonder whether there is room for a non-consortium consortium:
a brand for independent developers that is driven by optimal technical or
contrarian motivations rather than platform considerations? 

SAX and EXSLT are two examples of solid and workable APIs that
did not come out of a platform-vendor or its proxy. (Indeed this neutrality
probably helped their success.)

I know that Sun (eg through javadesktop) promotes non-Sun open source,
and that IBM has Apache (which really is a platform) and that MS has
its various initiatives to support open source on .NET.  And open source 
has
several other platform brands (GNU, GTK, Linux etc)

But what brand is available for projects that are non-, cross- or 
anti-platform?

People are fixated that standardization means unification: that there 
should only
be one way to do something ever standardized. But is the Java world 
really worse
off with Eclipse using SWT and Java supporting Swing? Is the world 
really worse
off that MS has Win32 and .NET?  Is the world really worse off that 
there is HTML
and PDF? Or rather HTML and XHTML? (Now I don't see that there is much need
for two standards where one is a spoiler, you saying tomato when I say 
tomato. Different
issue.)

However just because two technologies largely overlap is surely no 
reason to deprecate one: DOM/JDOM/XOM do the same things perhaps but 
approach the problem from different angles. In the meantime, if Apache 
is the only brand at the moment, is the answer for  Elliotte to move XOM 
to  Apache?

Cheers
Rick Jelliffe