Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 03/31/07 17:54

Scripsit Grant Robertson:

> I have found that sometimes if one reveals the true reason for a
> question, then respondents will prejudge one's intent and not provide
> accurate answers.

So what? Why would you want to get accurate answers to a wrong question
rather than (assumedly) less than perfect answers to your real question?
That's what people ask for very often on Usenet, though naturally they tend
to get inaccurate or wrong answers to their wrong question, and when they
finally (if ever) tell the real question, few people are interested in
helping any more.

>> The odds of having a useful system for marking up educational
>> material approved as a W3C "standard" (recommendation) are
>> comparable to the proverbial odds of a snowball in Sahara.
>
> Are you saying that marking up educational material so it is machine
> parseable is not something W3C is interested in?

I'm not saying much about the reasons for the small odds, but you should
realize that W3C is an industry consortium driven by the interests of the
major industry players.

>> It is questionable whether anyone would need a license to use some
>> tags.
>
> That is like saying it is questionable whether someone would need a
> license to use a protocol or to use some lines of code.

No it isn't. Program code is typically protected by copyright, unless it's
fairly trivial.

> Please also keep in mind: I will not be charging any licensing fees
> for the technology.

Do you think someone is interested?

> I will never "cash in" and sell this technology.

Quite probably, but the main reason is that nobody is interested in buying
it.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

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