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.'"

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Grassroots efforts do exist...

[Cherita Chen]

There are grassroots efforts out there. If you care to look, you can find them

Re:Why not the IETF?

[Pneuma ROCKS]

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.

Re:Why not the IETF?

[hixie]

Note that the WHATWG doesn't have membership in the W3C, which is what the grandparent was suggesting.

Re:First Post!

[dwayner79]

Not accourding to W3C
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fyro .slashdot.org%2Farticle.pl%3Fsid%3D06%2F07%2F18%2F 1725252%26threshold%3D-1

Re:I never understood..

[Waffle Iron]

How could they be proprietary?

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?

Re:Slow and cumbersome

[hixie]

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.

Zeldman is Exaggerating

[I'm Schepers]

"Some of the best minds working in web standards have been quietly or loudly abandoning the W3C. Bjoern Hoehrmann is the latest."

It's interesting that Mr. Zeldman links to an email in which Bjoern explicitly states that he is only leaving the QA Dev team, and is focusing on the W3C CSS and WebAPI Working Groups, where he is still active.

"Beholden to its corporate paymasters who alone can afford membership, the W3C seems increasingly detached from ordinary designers and developers."

I will note that Bjoern is one of many invited experts in the W3C... you don't have to pay to participate.

"It remains a closed, a one-way system."

As for me, I'm an ordinary developer, and my small consulting company ponied up the dough to join the W3C because we thought that it would be worth it to have a hand in leading standards and having a say in how things are developed. My new workplace, 6th Sense Analytics, will also be joining, because they feel the same way. Oh, and we didn't join at the 50K level, we joined at the reasonable 6K level, and I have never felt like we were treated as second-class citizens. If companies care enough about the standards they wish to adhere to, they can easily get involved in the W3C and mkae the changes... the more hands doing work, the better.

"To be fair, the W3C solicits community feedback before finalizing its recommendations. But asking people to comment on something that is nearly finished is not the same as finding out what they need and soliciting their collaboration from the start."

This statement is predicated on the idea that there is no way to ask for features and present use cases to the appropriate Working Group, a claim that Mr. Zeldman must know is incorrect. The SVG WG, for example, is basing many of its new features on author and user feedback over the last several years (from both the official W3C SVG list and the Yahoogroups SVG-Developers list), as well as taking into account the needs of its member organizations.

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.

Re:I never understood..

[amliebsch]

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.