Querying XML

Appendix B

Standards Processes

B.1 Introduction

The standards that we’ve discussed in this book have been developed under the auspices of several different organizations. Some of those organizations, such as the World Wide Web Consortium, disavow the word standard in favor of the less imperative-sounding word, recommendation. Nonetheless, the specifications they publish are viewed by the general community as standards. The specifications developed by consortia and other, sometimes less formal organizations may become widely used and respected, in which case they become de facto standards – standards in fact. For that matter, some entirely proprietary specifications developed by commercial organizations (including software companies like Oracle, ...