I just noticed that last week the W3C published a working draft specification for The XMLHttpRequest Object. I found the end of the working draft somewhat interesting. Read through the list of references and authors of the specifcation below

References

This section is normative

DOM3
Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 Core Specification, Arnaud Le Hors (IBM), Philippe Le Hégaret (W3C), Lauren Wood (SoftQuad, Inc.), Gavin Nicol (Inso EPS), Jonathan Robie (Texcel Research and Software AG), Mike Champion (Arbortext and Software AG), and Steve Byrne (JavaSoft).
RFC2119
Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels, S. Bradner.
RFC2616
Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1, R. Fielding (UC Irvine), J. Gettys (Compaq/W3C), J. Mogul (Compaq), H. Frystyk (W3C/MIT), L. Masinter (Xerox), P. Leach (Microsoft), and T. Berners-Lee (W3C/MIT).

B. Authors

This section is informative

The authors of this document are the members of the W3C Web APIs Working Group.

  • Robin Berjon, Expway (Working Group Chair)
  • Ian Davis, Talis Information Limited
  • Gorm Haug Eriksen, Opera Software
  • Marc Hadley, Sun Microsystems
  • Scott Hayman, Research In Motion
  • Ian Hickson, Google
  • Björn Höhrmann, Invited Expert
  • Dean Jackson, W3C
  • Christophe Jolif, ILOG
  • Luca Mascaro, HTML Writers Guild
  • Charles McCathieNevile, Opera Software
  • T.V. Raman, Google
  • Arun Ranganathan, AOL
  • John Robinson, AOL
  • Doug Schepers, Vectoreal
  • Michael Shenfield, Research In Motion
  • Jonas Sicking, Mozilla Foundation
  • Stéphane Sire, IntuiLab
  • Maciej Stachowiak, Apple Computer
  • Anne van Kesteren, Opera Software

Thanks to all those who have helped to improve this specification by sending suggestions and corrections. (Please, keep bugging us with your issues!)

Interesting. A W3C specification that documents a proprietary Microsoft API which not only does not include a Microsoft employee as a spec author but doesn't even reference any of the IXMLHttpRequest documentation on MSDN.

I'm sure there's a lesson in there somewhere. ;)