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W3C Launches Technical Architecture Group
jdaly writes "
In an effort to build shared understanding of Web Architecture principles, W3C has chartered and assembled a Technical Architecture Group - the TAG for short. The TAG will document cross-technology Web architecture principles, and resolve architectural issues. The TAG will conduct its work on a public mailing list.
Chair Tim Berners-Lee, Paul Cotton, Roy Fielding, David Orchard, Norman Walsh, and Stuart Williams join appointees Tim Bray, Dan Connolly, and Chris Lilley as the first TAG participants.
Of note to Slashdot readers (perhaps): Neither Tim Bray nor Roy Fielding are connected with W3C Member organizations. Instead, they were chosen for their knowledge and achievements - as well as the importance they have in technical communities.
Here is the general press release and the TAG homepage.
"
that I got First Post!
I am the best.
This early post for Ida!
The W3C went from a useful to a stubborn to a useless organization. Who has time to wade through ten feet of W3C missives if all a web developer really needs to know is Internet Explorer?
Pushin' 'n dealin', shovin' 'n stealin'
I just don't know if another WG is going to change anything. The "business of the web" forges ahead (or sideways, or in reverse) pretty consistently in defiance of any standards or consensus. Sometimes they even try to present their own proprietary technologies as THE standard. Remember in the early days of the MS anti-trust case and Netscape and AOL whining that MS had used their versions of the technologies to assert a control over the net that they were not entitled to. But yours (and my) feelings about MS aside, it was really a joke because both NS and AOL had already spent years subverting the standards to their own purposes. It's going to take a lot more than a dozen, admittedly great, minds hammering out a philosophyover coffeee and cigars.
Oops
W3c has been usless so far, why do we want more help from them
It's good to see this simply because cross-Web architectures will no longer be left to companies like Microsoft, who will then try to push DCOM and other incompatible technologies on software companies and, ultimately, consumers. While you may like or dislike DCOM and similar technologies, these closed standards make interoperability difficult and the lack of an open steering group can only harm future developments in this area.
Also, I'm heartened to see big names with good cred involved in the process. This is not a group of no-names we're talking about here; these are knowledgeable people with a solid background in the matter, and this can only be good for the future direction of these technologies.
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
Guten Tag, TAG! ;)
Ok, so that's probably not all that funny, but I enjoyed it. In all seriousness, I am glad to see this though, and that they have their mailing list up and running.
Ask yourself whether you expect the TAG to be here in 5 years. Ah-hah.
If these guys do their jobs right, maybe we will see enough improvement that webpages won't have to be specially designed to work with all browsers any more. Think of all the extra time you'd have on your hands...
I'm anispeptic, frasmotic, even compunctuous to have caused you such pericombobulation.
I'm sure the Technical Architecture Group is pivotal to all life on earth but let's get one thing clear. The buzzword of 2002 is "architecture". In case you've been living in Layton UT for the last 3 months you've realized by now every commercial on TV and every website has finished or is about to finish changing its strategy to focus on "architecture". Just a nugget of career advancing vocabulary you should tack onto your "solution", "commerce", and "appliance" words of 1999, 2000, and 2001 respectively.
In creating systems, normally you have an architecture in which you design and code to. Having a architecture, after the fact, can help, but is not nearly as useful as having it to start.
Looking for any old 8-bit Heathkit/Zenith software/hardware - http://heathkit.garlanger.com
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Horror/Sci Fi writer Stephen King was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
Let's have a close look at the costs involved when running a Linux system.
An important factor in Linux' cost is its maintenance. Linux requires a *lot* of maintenance, work doable only by the relatively few high-paid Linux administrators that put themselves - of course willingly - at a great place in the market. Linux seems to be needing maintenance continuously, to keep it from breaking down.
Add to this the cost of loss of data. Linux' native file system, EXT2FS, is known to lose data like a firehose spouts water when the file system isn't unmounted properly. Other unix file systems are much more tolerant towards unexpected crashes. An example is the FreeBSD file system, which with soft updates enabled, performance-wise blows EXT2FS out of the water, and doesn't have the negative drawback of extreme data loss in case of a system breakdown.
According to Linux advocates, an alternative to EXT2FS would be ReiserFS. Unfortunately, ReiserFS is still in beta stage. This means it is not intended for production use (although according to many Linux advocates this shouldn't be a problem, which makes me wonder how (little) valuable they find your data).
The other proposed 'solution', EXT3FS, is nothing more than an ugly hack to put journaling into the file system. All the drawbacks of the ancient EXT2FS file system remain in EXT3FS, for the sake of 'forward- and backward compatibility'. This is interesting, considering that the DOS heritage in the Windows 9x/ME series was considered a very bad thing by the Linux community, even though it provided what could be called one of the best examples of compatibility, ever. When it's about Linux, compatibility constraints don't seem to be that much of a problem for Linux advocates.
Back to Linux' cost. Factor in also the fact that crashes happen much more often on Linux than on other unices. On other unices, crashes usually are caused by external sources like power outages. Crashes in Linux are a regular thing, and nobody seems to know what causes them, internally. Linux advocates try to hide this fact by denying crashes ever happen. Instead, they have frequent "hardware problems".
The steep learning curve compared to about any other operating system out there is a major factor in Linux' cost. The system is a mix of features from all kinds of unices, but not one of them is implemented right. A Linux user has to live with badly coded tools which have low performance, mangle data seemingly at random and are not in line with their specification. On top of that a lot of them spit out the most childish and unprofessional messages, indicating that they were created by 14-year olds with too much time, no talent and a bad attitude.
I could go on and on and on, but the conclusion is clear. Linux is not an option for any one who seeks a professional OS with high performance, scalability, stability, adherence to standards, etc.
(disregarding most of above post, although he's right about the lost art of trolling.)
"tey" sounds quite cool, actually. However, just as we have come to need a gender-ambiguous pronoun, how about a singular/plural ambiguous one? "they" again ? once again, that solution devalues the original use of "they". Suggestions?
Choice of masters is not freedom.
Apart from perhaps the w3c members themselves, there are no 'independent' members of any kind. No-one, for example, from the EFF or Commercial Linux/BSD vendors (are there commercial BSD vendors?)
Learning at some schools is like drinking from a Firehose
The creation of this group will likely improve the W3Cs ability to manage the growth of XML-based technologies that are being submitted. This should be a good thing for developers who use XML, as the really cool stuff should be available sooner now.
I Heart Sorting Networks
FONT and CSS junk
and
Web page development tools that don't work - from the W3C
Maybe someone will read thru these and make some recomendations to the W3C!!!!
Whew. Thank gods. For the last 4 years, I've been working on a commerce appliance solution architecture.
(hey, it's Friday, give me a bre -- *thwack* )
-LunaticThey need to train special armed forces to make sure every one stay on W3C recomends...
[My english is better than most other people's Turkish, so please point out mistakes politely. Thank you.]
Let's hope they never have to conform to the standards - by having an end-TAG.
--
(if you're still looking for the point, it was back there, in the post. </sig>)
I am quite new and learning web design and new technologies at University, so my questions might not be that interesting.
However, I have a legitimate inquiry: does anyone still follow the cross platform issues? I mean, when I design I only bear in mind the IE users because, after all, they are the biggest group on the web.
I am sorry if my question comes out in a dumb manner, but I was just pointed to this wonderful website (by my girlfriend, but that's another story LOL!) and I am really trying to learn the arts of being a good designer.
I give in to sin because I like to practice what I preach.
I'm not sure I approve of any more "innovations" by the W3C. Their last one is still sticking in my throat.
Standards must be freely useable. If they aren't, then they aren't standards. If some body which calls itself a standards organization creates a "standard" that is not freely useable then they have simultaneously:
a) degraded the language
b) dishonored themselves
c) thrown into doubt all of their previous an future actions.
Has the W3C rescinded the RAND proposal? If so, then I haven't heard about it. If not, then they aren't a standards group, and if they claim to be one they lie. They were a standards group.
.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
But they don't know anything about technical architecture! Look at the crap they've come up with: DOM, HTTP 1.0, HTML standards that aren't backward compatible, XML for everything. Ugh. These guys have set network computing back 30 years by being the first ones out the gate with inferior solutions.
This sounds like another circle jerk with the same professional committee-sitters as you'll find on half of the other W3 boards.
I for one am really happy to see Tim Bray back in the W3C process. It's good to see someone as efficient, experimented and no-nonsense as him involved.
Plus of course as a Perl hacker, it's good to see the guy who coined the phrase "desperate Perl Hacker" (a target of the XML specification, the DPH can supposedly write an XML parser in a week) in a position to remind other W3C Working Groups that there exists indeed other languages than Java.
Look, that's why there's rules, understand? So that you think before you break 'em. (Terry Pratchett)
Regardless of whether or not this is a good idea (I have my doubts about most things the W3C does these days, but still), their decision to go mailing list is IMO crappy. ML's are nice for people who don't have much to say, but for real, down-to-earth continuous and semi-real time discussion and feedback nothing beats newsgroups. I'm not suggesting they set up a new Usenet hierarchy (or even use an existing one), but I'd think that if they can host a ML they can sure as heck put up an NNTP server and do their thing there. They have to moderate anyway, so there's no difference.
Not to go OT here, but who really thinks the different OSS mailing lists are a better medium than a good ol' newsgroup?
This morning's $0.02
Spoon!! (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 14, @12:31PM (#2704984)
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It's a grad student who's supposed to be able to write an XML parser in a week. The DPH extracts data from an XML document *without* an XML parser, probably by using Perl regular expressions.
Seems to be a fair bit of misunderstanding about the TAG and it's charter. It's not going to make browsers implement the same version of xhtml, it's not going to stop innovation or solve world hunger. At least what it can do is actually document what the current web architecture is, maybe prevent messes like absolute/relative URI xml namespace names, arbitrate on overlaps between W3C working groups, and liase better with non-W3C working groups. Cheers, Dave Orchard
This is from one of the newly elected TAG members
Bzzzt...
Ted Nelson came up with hypertext in the 70s. So much for being 'first out of the gate'.
Until Tim came along the field had got precisely nowhere with fifty plans for broken hypertext schemes backed by database systems that didn't scale.
The hypertext community deserved what they got, they failed to deliver, Tim did.
There are plenty of failed hypertext wonks who will explain why their system was better than the Web, just as there are network architects that will tell you how great OSI networking is, and folk who will explain how they would have caught the 40 yard pass if they were playing in the superbowl.
If you think Xanadu is better than the Web then maybe you should wait a couple of centuries while Ted finishes it. The rest of us realise that having an 80% solution today is better than waiting forever for a 100% solution.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/