Problems at the W3C

dustin writes "Public outcry against the workings of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is growing. On Sunday, Björn Höhrmann announced his departure in a lengthy critique of problems at the W3C. Web standards champion Zeldman adds his comments as well: 'Beholden to its corporate paymasters who alone can afford membership, the W3C seems increasingly detached from ordinary designers and developers.'"

Comments

Open version of W3C?

[MoFoQ]

Does this mean that an open version of the W3C will come about?

Needs some competition

[Chris Graham]

This kind of chaos is typical of academia. There's no profit motive, no distinct customer to serve.
What we need is to open up the standards market and encourage some commercial competition between standards. Standards that cannot create a profit will go out of business, whilst new, more profitable standards will reign supreme. With 100 standards competing for developers and corporate sponsors, us web developers will get the choice of the semantic swimming pool that serves each of us best. Personally I always thought that the sexual overtones of 'head' and 'body', and especially 'foot' had no place in a standard, so I'll be renaming them to 'first', 'second' and 'third'.

Re:Wrong Problem

[linvir]

We're very, very sorry.

What a letter!

[Rob T Firefly]

That's one hell of a grievance note. Well-written, well thought out, and it makes its points well. That time I stuck a note to the convenience store owner's door raising certain questions regarding his personal pedigree as a result of his mother's alleged affection for certain types of sea otter before setting my uniform shirt on fire in the parking lot and never going back, sort of pales in comparison.

Re:I never understood..

[JakusMinimus]

Your analogy sucks. It sucks because it is based on the implicit assumption that none of the farmers will attempt to dominate and/or kill off the others.

Fox in the hen-house was quite apt.

Re:Wrong Problem

[dgatwood]

Yeah. What part of "Linux Is Not UniX" did they not understand?

;-)

on a tangential note..

[sshore]

Know what a swedish lightsaber sounds like?

Björnnnn!

Re:Wrong Problem

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

Standards are meant for ***interoperability***. ... On the other hand a specification, is about ***portability***...

Hey, you just pulled that distinction out of your ass! That's not allowed!

Huh. Jeffrey Zeldman linked to my blog.

[DZR]

Dude, I'm like famous. So now I have two readers.

Re:Wrong Problem

[tehcyder]

Next you're going to be telling us that BSD also isn't Unix

LIke, duh, does "BSD" look or sound anything at all like "Unix"?

So obviously they are totally different. Noob.