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Problems at the W3C

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the family-feud dept.

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.'"

1 of 303 comments (clear)

  1. Zeldman is Exaggerating by I'm+Schepers · · Score: 5, Informative

    "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.