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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.'"
Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, and Apple are all members of the W3C according to its members page.
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There are grassroots efforts out there. If you care to look, you can find them
I'm not fat, just big boned...
Thats 6k only for Profit Free Organizations, its far more expensive for big companies. Though you are correct in that even at 65k/yr, it is pocket change for all large companies
Actually, there already exists such an organization: the WHATWG. It was created by browser developers including Opera, Mozilla and the makers of Safari. They have released several specifications, some of which have already been implemented into the browsers. For instance, the canvas element, and SessionStorage, which is included in the upcoming Firefox 2.
Quite frankly I prefer the idea of a single standards organization, in this case the W3C. It's more sensible to find ways to make this organization more flexible and open than to start having competing standards and the unavoidable incompatibilities. But sometimes there is no alternative than radical change. I hope it doesn't come down to this.
Favorite quote: "
Microsoft have absolutely nothing to do with any of the problems that are listed in the article.
Note that the WHATWG doesn't have membership in the W3C, which is what the grandparent was suggesting.
I haven't seen that one happen yet, especially since Linux doesn't purport to be UNIX(tm) (though it is Unix.)
Start telling people it's not POSIX, though, and they'll argue.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Not accourding to W3Co .slashdot.org%2Farticle.pl%3Fsid%3D06%2F07%2F18%2F 1725252%26threshold%3D-1
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fyr
Religion and politics, without the flame. godgab.org
Jesus H, anybody who knows anything knows that Linux is not UNIX, and nobody besides a few noobs has ever suggested that Linux was UNIX. At best, it's a mix of SystemV and Berkley UNIX-like features, but guess what, it doesn't make a lick of difference. What! Shock? Horror? No, as you pointed out with your careful choice of words, UNIX is a specification -NOT- a standard. That's a very crucial distinction. Standards are meant for ***interoperability***. Standards are what allows that precious IE of yours to work with the Apache web server. Hell, it's what allows Window's TCPIP stack to work on the internet. On the other hand a specification, is about ***portability***, NOT interoperability. Conform to a specification, and you can be pretty well ensured of portability. People bash IE because MS constantly tries to violate standards. If MS used IE to comply with standards, rather than subvert them, but failed to make IE conform to, say the Mozilla XUL specification, then you'd have a valid point.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
By being patented. Proprietary software is essentially the only development model that's compatible with patents.
And of course standards controlled by Microsoft would most likely be covered by MS patents. Why wouldn't they be?
CSS2.1 went back to working draft because we got some 100 or so comments on it when we last went to CR. If you read Bjoern's original mail, he pointed out that some W3C groups weren't dealing with comments -- well, the CSS group is one of the few groups that _is_, and that's why it's taking a long time for CSS2.1 to be completed. You can't have it both ways: either we listen to your feedback and fix the spec, or we ignore everyone's feedback and make an irrelevant spec.
These have existed for years:
http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy/
http://validator.w3.org/
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
All of these are front-page links at w3.org.
There's nothing you have that they can't take away: Absolute zero, Gentle Jack, bottom line.
Promoting other standards besides those from W3C, like microformats, is great. There's no need to be so disingenuous and inflammatory about it, though. Mr. Zeldman has no talkback on his forum for me to refute his claims, so I had to post this here. I think he's becoming increasingly detached from ordinary designers and developers. Okay, that was a cheap joke... couldn't help myself.
In the interest of accuracy, canvas was actually implemented by Safari before it was specced. IIRC (I participate in WHATWG but haven't followed canvas closely) a few changes were made between the spec and safari's version, but not many.
Session storage was specced before being implemented, although there was (and still is) editing done based on feedback from the people implementing it.
There are 11 types of people in the world: those who can count in binary, and those who can't.
Yes, a company could do that. But can you see Microsoft doing it?
That's exactly what Microsoft is doing for their OpenXML document format.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Next you're going to be telling us that BSD also isn't Unix....
|>oug
If you read the original post in this thread that I responded to, you'll see that I wasn't arguing that Microsoft have never (or will never) abuse their dominant market position. We know they do that, they've been convicted of doing that. What I said was simply that Microsoft was not to blame for the things that are wrong at the W3C, most notably, those that Bjoern mentioned in TFA.
Life isn't like the movies or video games. Companies can be in the wrong in some areas without being the root cause of badness everywhere. Multiple groups of people can be in the wrong in multiple places and at multiple times.