Page:Exploring the Internet.djvu/26

 I was still standing. A pause introduced itself, so it seemed an appropriate moment for a few formalities.

"Glad to meet you," I said, holding out my hand.

McKenzie continued to glance at the floor and Dr. Zakharov grunted in what I took to be an amiable fashion so I gathered my courage and made a little speech about how my efforts with the ITU were experimental, provisional, something we could learn from, temporary, and any other non-threatening platitudes I could think of.

My little speech contained a fatal flaw. I had used the pronoun "we." Now, "we" is not totally inappropriate as this effort was based on the efforts of several interested parties, but I must admit that the corporate offices of Me, Inc. do not actually teem with corporate retainers.

"We?" Zakharov pounced. "Who is 'we'?" he demanded. "How many members are on your team, anyway?"

Like many corporate types, my lack of a formal institutional affiliation did not sit well with him. I sidestepped his question and explained that, in my view, the question of publishing standards was, rhetoric notwithstanding, just not that hard. After all, there were hundreds of ways to get data on-line, ranging from Wordstar to bitmaps to SGML (an ISO standard).

To say that ISO viewed my little project as a threat was an understatement. Zakharov let slip that the Secretary-General of ISO had sent a letter to his counterpart at the ITU protesting the experiment. Zakharov made it quite clear that he viewed my approach as simplistic, misguided, and naive.

I gently tried to make the point that there were positive aspects to this project that should not be overlooked, such as increasing the public awareness of the vital work that groups like ISO were undertaking by making primary resource documents available to a wider audience.

Once again, my diplomatic efforts seemed less than successful. "People don't need to read the standards," Dr. Zakharov snapped. Indeed, he felt that ISO standards were basically unreadable and that normal people shouldn't even bother to try. What was apparently needed was some guru to write a book, and that these second