Slashdot Mirror
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.
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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
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)
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.
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