Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
I never understood why web standards aren't maintained by the folks that actually are writing the browsers. Membership would require a browser with, say, x% market share.
This would seem to be a slam dunk to me. I figure you get Microsoft, Mozilla and Opera to the table, you'd have some pretty interesting standards developed that the browsers might stick to.
Might. Anyway, it'd be better than having some extra organization making up rules that none of them really pay more than a passing look at.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Seems like the logical place to me.
Execute? [Y/N] _
The summary mis-represents the bulk of Bjoern's critique, which less about the lack of non-corporate participation and more about the fact that the organization just doesn't work.
I wonder how the bulk of slashdotters, for whom a W3C standard seems to be a sacred cow, will react to the message that these standards are all-too-often ambiguous, bone-headed, poorly supported, slow-moving, and lacking important features.
As long as clients ask for shiny spinning mouseover widgets and marquee scrollers on their crappy company homepages, and as long as us designers need their money, standards will continue to be meaningless. If Client X clicks on his little blue 'e' and sees what he wants to see, Designer Y gets to eat that week. I can suggest that their choices are bad, but the customer is always right (and I must quit bitching before he takes the project to his nephew who'll do it for free)...
Truly, I'd LOVE to be able to tell a guy, "No, sir, we can't do that. It's not supported by any of the current browsers." And then deliver a clean, stylish Zeldman wet dream.
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
Well, just as an outside observer, it seems like the W3C is not very interested in "the web as application platform" -- instead pushing new document models like XHTML2 that don't really solve any realworld app dev problems.
At least from my POV, the stuff going on at WHATWG -- such as a vastly improved FORM model and standardized AJAX support -- will have much more relevance to the web in the manner that I and probably most other slashdotters build it.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
You're exactly the kind of person I love to hate. "Oh, I can't use that, so I'll use this, which is just as bad if not worse."
First, Flash is as closed as closed can be. Second, it's completely proprietary. Third, Macrodobe only really support Mac and Windows for the Flash Player. Still no version 8 for Linux (and they themselves have announced that there never will be an 8 for Linux), while 9 is betaing for OSX and Windows.
I'd rather use the standards which have been "piecemealed together by a bunch of wacky nerds" rather than using something which limits people to using X with Y on Z running P which Q made you pay for because R told them to.
I may like some of the things done with Flash, but I really don't think it's well suited for doing full websites. Intros, sections of navigation, maybe. But it's too much of a resource hog, too bloated, and I hate not being able to navigate using the keyboard.
Goten Xiao
Well, if you want to produce websites that happen to work on a fairly limited set of browsers, why don't you just makes a PDF and get the whole thing over and done with?
There are very good reasons why you can't just lay a website out however you want, namely, it doesn't make sense if the final render target is something you don't expect. Like, oooh, I dunno, paper.
The web is designed for accessibility. It's intended that anyone can read your site, and that it will degrade fairly well for browsers that support less features. If that's not important to you, fine, but stop claiming you're producing web sites if you're just making large Flash documents.
Please?
"A non-profit organization with a focus on development and maintenance of web standards" is exactly what W3C staff think the W3C is. What would prevent the staff of a new organisation from ending up in the same state?
The main problem here is that everyone who's in the "online biz" views the web as a tool to enhance their own leverage on their market share. MS tries to tie more parts of Windows into web apps so Windows has a leverage against alternative operating systems. Oracle tries to push their "web access enhancing" tools to gain market shares in the online database market. And I wouldn't be surprised if Apple was trying to get iTunes somehow into a webified form so they get a leverage on their online music share.
Nobody cares about the web or compatibility. Actually, everyone is trying its best to create as much incompatibility as possible.
W3C is standing in the way of big enterprises. Its very existance is a nuisance (not enough for a danger, but a nuisance) to the leveraging attempts of the big players.
So they have a really, really hard time. There's as far as I can judge nobody with big pockets on their side, but a lot of cash against them.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I've been highly critical of Tim Berners-Lee leadership on the W3C. He established a structure that sidelined individual, mostly-disinterested members and replaced them by corporations interested in log-jam and difficult implementations that keep the small players away. The W3C was from the get go the antithesis of the IETF.
Tim then jumped into the dubious "semantic web" runaway train, full of inflated promises but bereft of actual results. The "semantic web" is high-risk research best left in the hands of academia. A standards body organization should be focusing on how to make the web better today, by improving on the current protocols, not on day dreaming about HAL-like computers.
Anybody who ever tried Amaya would agree with you, no product, at least not a usable one.
esoteric markup languages
XHTML and CSS aren't esoteric. They are widely understood and widely used. They also don't lock you into a proprietary content creation tool and a proprietary viewer. I'd rather not put the whole future of the Web in the hands of a single company, no matter how good their products.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Microsoft have no part in the running of the W3C Team. If the W3C Team wanted to fix the problems that Bjoern listed, they would not find Microsoft stopping them. Blaming Microsoft for the W3C's problems is ridiculous Slashdot-flamebaiting.
Internet Explorer 7, which hasn't even been released yet, will not support large sections of the CSS 2 specification, published by the W3C in 1998. If you think the W3C are behind everybody else, then I believe you are only looking at the bits and pieces of their specifications that are actually implemented by the browser developers. With that twisted reasoning, it's logically impossible for them to be ahead.
Rounded corners are in CSS 3. Browsers haven't finished implementing CSS 2 yet. What's the point in the W3C racing even further ahead when the lack of browser support means it won't make any difference for years to come?
CSS 3 is a group of specifications, not a single specification, and some of them are ready to be implemented. So the answer to your question "How long?" is "Already there."
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
"Anyway, if you don't like one standards organization it doesn't mean you should bundle yourself up in a proprietary binary format. Write a new incredible standard and people will support it."
You're missing my point. Designers who use Flash to avoid the hassles of XHTML/CSS aren't likely to develop new standards of their own. And why do so many people expect designers to care about open standards? Many, if the the majority, of design applications - Quark, Illustrator, Indesign, Maya, and so on - use proprietary standards. Aside from simple printed products, much of the world's digital creative output ends up on proprietary standards - CD, DVD, AAC, WMV. Openness is the exception, not the rules, and to many people, there is little, if anything, sinister about proprietary standards. Given that, if the web standards crowd expects people to give a damn about open standards, much less use them, they need to do a better job of putting on a big happy face and getting along with the rest of the world.
When I go to the Macromedia/Adobe web site, I'm greeted with a lot of well-written information for designers and technical people. The applications come with great documentation built-in. It's all happy, and pretty, and user-friendly. At the W3C site I get buggy validation tools and a bunch of not-too-useful, esoteric documentation that rarely covers practical aspects of web design. That's not the kind of stuff that wins people over - especially when developing for open standards tends to require more knowledge and effort than the alternative.
I would just call it a standard and be done with it. ;-) It's far more mature than any other W3C document ever released (maybe except the XML 1.1 spec, which isn't bad, all things considered). It's definitely being read by Web browser vendors (including MS) and being treated as the normative reference. The fact that it has the label "Working Draft" is just an artefact of the W3C Process, which, IMHO, is yet another example of a W3C problem.
I think if you can get Opera and Mozilla on board, then I think Microsoft will be forced to follow.
Really?
The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race. - Don Marquis (1878-1937)
From a business perspective:
Mind you, I'm just playing Devil's advocate here. I don't think much of Flash to begin with, and I use Linux so I'm in that unsupported 1%. I'm a big fan of portability. But you have to admit, the prospect of developing for a single, consistent platform is very seductive, especially when you look at the marginal cost of reaching those few extra people.
A couple other benefits from the non-technical end of things. Flash is harder to reverse engineer, so it's harder for the merely curious to poke at the soft underbelly of your web site. It's not perfect, but obscurity is security when you're only concerned about keeping the masses at bay and don't care about the occasional person with actual skill. Also, the designer has complete control over the Flash presentation. None of this "hope the browser renders is properly" nonsense. Everything is pixel-for-pixel the way it's supposed to be. What-I-See-Is-What-You-Get. Non-technical designers want to control everything about the presentation; they want to provide a uniform "experience" to the end-users. We geeks don't care about that, and really prefer it the other way around. Decouple the medium from the message and we're empowered. I can put the message on my Palm Pilot, or play it through a speech synthesizer, or present it in ways the designer never dreamed up. Many designers prefer Flash simply because we can't twist their message to another medium.
I'm not saying that these reasons are right, just trying to point out other perspectives.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
The W3C should be absorbed by a more stable, functional, and respected international standards entity such as IEEE.
While I believe in what the W3C does and produces, that's irrelevant when they produce next to nothing over the course of six years (which many thousands of people work with daily).
The cost of membership in W3C may be as low as USD6k, but the cost of participation is much higher. I've been a member of two W3C working groups, and they've both taken a day each week to keep up-to-date on developments. Add in the cost of face-to-face meetings, and any organisation that expects to actively participate in the W3C will be facing a much higher cost (including staff time, etc) than the $6k figure you quote.
I always thought that the WC3 were concentrating on really complicated solutions that were not really needed, while ignoring the simple obvious stuff that was missing.
Take the example of Frames. An awful lot of web sites consist of a number of pages which all have a common main menu. Now the problem is if you hardcode the HTML into each of your pages you have a maintence problem, because the main menu is going to change a lot over time. So there are 2 solutions to the problem, neither of them are ideal:
1) Use frames. Well, we all know the problem with frames. You loose functionality of the forward and back browser buttons, along with various other problems
2) Use server side scripts to create the pages dynamically. In my opinion, this is wrong. You shouldn't need to write code just to display simple static pages. You're introducing an unnesecary dependancy.
The obvious solution to the problem is to "fix" frames. In other words, introduce a standard for including webpages within other web pages where the browser treats the combined page as just one single entity. This would be a very effective and simple solution.
This is just a example of a common problem with HTML, there are many others,
which will probably never be addressed, just because they are to ordinary to merit the interest of the WC3
CSS is a tree decoration language. HTML is a document tree language. Why would they use the same syntax? That's like saying C++ should use the same syntax as XML. Or that PNG images should use the same syntax as e-mails. You use the right syntax for the job.
God how I love you Flash fan-boys. You've been beating this horse for years now. Guess what. It's still dead. Yes, Flash does have a place on the Web but it's not as a complete replacement for markup, stylesheets, and scripting. Flash is niche and always will be despite the fact that it's installed on 9x% of machines. I've been building corporate websites, web-based advertising, and web applications for software and technology companies for 15 years now. I've happily worked with some of the best Flash designers and developers in the US. Flash has never been a threat to my job and I don't see that ever changing.