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

Possible solution?

[QuantumFTL]

Maybe a non-profit organization of independent web developers could be formed (perhaps already exists?) that could obtain membership on their behalf?

Re:Possible solution?

[hixie]

"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?

Re:Possible solution?

[twistedsymphony]

Perhaps a BETTER institution would be one that tells you how to code your pages to work with 100% of browsers as they are today (broken features in all) and in addition to that makes suggestions for where browsers should go next.

W3C standards are nice and all but IMO a web standard is only as good as the % of browsers in use that support it. You can speak perfect french but if everyone trying to talk to you is Japanese it doesn't do you much good. Sure I can make my webpage conform to a standard (w3C or otherwise) but that doesn't mean the page will actually work when viewed with browser X or Y. A much more USEFUL and BENEFICIAL tool would be one that tells me what I have to do to make my page work with everything out there. Tell me this line of code wont work when viewed using IE4 on tuesdays after 4PM... and maybe even give me an estimate on what % of users will be left out in the cold based on recent web browser usage estimates.

The W3C and other standards are good for making suggestions as to where the next generation of browsers should go but it's fairly useless in practice if the browsers people are using TODAY don't fully support it.

I never understood..

[grasshoppa]

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.

Re:I never understood..

[quanticle]

figure you get Microsoft, Mozilla and Opera to the table, you'd have some pretty interesting standards developed that the browsers might stick to.

That sounds great in theory, but what would probably happen in reality is that Microsoft would end up writing the standard, and adding proprietary, patented extensions onto it in order to ensure permanent dominance for Internet Explorer.

I would much rather have a somewhat supported open standard, rather than having a closed standard perfectly supported by one company.

Re:I never understood..

[Shining Celebi]

Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, and Apple are all members of the W3C according to its members page.

Re:I never understood..

[fm6]

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.

That's not Microsoft's history with standards bodies. They come up with some ideas that rely heavily on their own technology. (Did you know that the first version of XSL used Visual Basic as a transform language?!) When the other participants fail to react with total enthusiasm, they decide that standards are overrated.

To be fair, Netscape in its heyday was just as bad as Microsoft when it came to ignoring standards. But I've long thought that both Microsoft and Netscape would have been more standards compliant if W3C had done something to encourage standards compliance. Like trying to issue standards on a timely basis, instead of just assuming that implementers would sit on their hands until standards were ready. Or like creating standards tests instead of waiting for third parties to do it.

But no, they just shrug their shoulders and keep creating standards that nobody will ever implement. W3C has not been effective for a very long time.

Re:I never understood..

[man_of_mr_e]

Uhhh... think... hmmm.. thing some more...

Nope.. I just can't seem to put the pieces together here. If Microsoft writes things into the standard, how could they be extensions? How could they be proprietary?

What were you trying to say?

Re:I never understood..

[fotoflojoe]

That sounds great in theory, but what would probably happen in reality is that Microsoft would end up writing the standard, and adding proprietary, patented extensions onto it in order to ensure permanent dominance for Internet Explorer.
Agreed.
A scenario like what the GP suggests would create a 'fox guarding the hen house' kind of situation.

Re:I never understood..

[baadger]

The root issue is that MS doesn't see web standards support as an important competitive issue.

Yet. Once IE7 has shipped with whole bunch of competitive out of the box features, Microsoft has to put it's foot down and start the real work of restoring faith in it's users. Firefox's usage may be low, but i'm sure most of remaining IE userbase must have been feeling *the ripples* even if they aren't aware of Firefox's existance or choose not to use it.

I'm of the opinion that IE7 is just a distraction, a way of catching up superficially to yank on the chains of the competition. Once it's out and the buzz has died down they are going to need that late 90's velocity right back (and they *have* said there will be more frequent updates to IE) otherwise it's going to be a gross waste of time and a huge disappointment.

The question is, will Firefox's (now large) ego survive a battering if MS really ramp it up in IE8 once Vista is out of the box and can Mozilla remain competitive? Personally I hope not, being humbled is good for the thought process.

Re:I never understood..

[hixie]

Actually Microsoft take part in several working groups, most notably the CSS working group, and seem to do so in good faith. They play by our extension rules, they are making attempts at fixing their standards compliance bugs, etc. I'm not saying they're perfect, but ever since Firefox showed them their market share wasn't guaranteed, they've become active again and have been acting as reasonably as the other major browser vendors.

Re:I never understood..

[RingDev]

I don't think that's an acurate analogy. I think having MS, FF, OP developing standards would be more along the lines of having a coop of farmers guarding the hen house, as opposed to having an independat group of part time hobby farmers (W3C) trying to raise the chickens.

-Rick

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: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:I never understood..

[Tom Veil]

Or like creating standards tests instead of waiting for third parties to do it.

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.

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.

Re:I never understood..

[hixie]

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.

Why not the IETF?

[Skynet]

Seems like the logical place to me.

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:Why not the IETF?

[dolphinling]

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.

How disappointing

[billDCat]

How disappointing to hear this. We area at a time right now when we need standards more than anything. Between the onslaught of AJAX apps, the preponderance of Flash web apps, and the attempt by Microsoft to convert web apps to an extension of Windows with Sparkle and Avalon, we wholeheartedly need strong standards.

Re:How disappointing

[NutscrapeSucks]

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.

Wrong Problem

[ichin4]

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.

Re:Wrong Problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Standards aren't a sacred cow here -- they're just a convienent cudgel to bash Internet Explorer with.

Suggest that Linux fails to meet UNIX specifications, for example, and watch the apologies flow in.

Re:Wrong Problem

[linvir]

We're very, very sorry.

Re:Wrong Problem

[drinkypoo]

Suggest that Linux fails to meet UNIX specifications, for example, and watch the apologies flow in.

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.

Re:Wrong Problem

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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.

I think you're being a little unfair there. There are some highly vocal, pro-W3C zealots around, but there are also some of us who have always argued that any sort of formal specification is merely a means to an end, and should be used if (and only if) that end is desirable under the circumstances.

In web design, if you want maximum portability, you follow W3C standards for all the smaller browsers, and then provide suitable hacks for the big one. OTOH, if you just want to reach most of the general public and don't want to chase diminishing returns much, targetting IE is the obvious choice, since it is the only relevant standard (albeit a de facto one) in this context, and your pages will still mostly work on other browsers (or get their users to switch back temporarily to IE) anyway.

Similarly for corporate intranets, some people bitch about how dangerous ActiveX is and yada yada yada, but the fact remains that it's a practical tool to solve a problem. Users complaining that "better" browsers like Firefox don't support it is going to cut exactly zero ice with any corporate management/IT.

IME, posts pointing this sort of thing out are frequently modded both Insightful and Troll/Flamebait several times, usually more + than -. Thus it seems rather unfair to characterise "the bulk of slashdotters" as being semi-religious W3C devotees. The majority of posters in certain discussions perhaps, but apparently not the majority of mods, and we'll never know about the lurkers or those who do post but are sensible enough to avoid religious topics.

Re:Wrong Problem

[dgatwood]

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

;-)

Re:Wrong Problem

[yo_tuco]

"your pages will still mostly work on other browsers (or get their users to switch back temporarily to IE) anyway."

But some can't switch back because it was never there to begin with.

Re:Wrong Problem

[J Story]

Bjoern's complaints address a number of inadequacies, but what stands out for me is an apparent lack of communication between his group and "them", and that puzzles me. Is the W3C some kind of star chamber? Is the list of its individual participants -- the people, not the companies -- held secret? Why is he not naming names?

Usually, if you take it upon yourself to do the legwork and you continually follow up with key members of a group, you can obtain a response and a justification. This is not easy, and sometimes it requires a team of dedicated people, but committee groupthink will take all kinds of silly positions if its individuals are not held to account as individuals.

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!

Re:Wrong Problem

[Nexx]

First... any IT guy worthy of being even an intern would add disabling of ActiveX if not outright banning the use of IE to his corporate security policy. The number of security issues it presents make it simply not worth the effort or down time of patching. You don't have to shut down other apps or reboot the computer for a firefox update... calulate the man hour savings of JUST that.

It's all about balance, of course. If my intranet app worked with IE, I can do the following with the reasonal expectation that it will work, with minimal cost on my part:

1. webapp using my ActiveDirectory to authenticate remote users
2. being able to push IE updates, etc., in a controlled manner, so we can test for incompatibilities with intranet applications, mooting your point w.r.t. requiring machine reboots for updates.
3. being able to find support for the MS Stack.

While there are probably tools and extensions to work around that, investigating those workarounds and implementing them will merely be additional burden on my organisation. It's also a larger perceived risk of exposing the corner cases that the independent developer has not thought about.

Now... managers... they care about bottom line and cost. Why on earth would you beleive they would not care to listen about the cost savings involved in using php/mysql over activex/mssql? The portability and down time reductions? All of these are things managers care VERY much about.

It's interesting that you bring up costs, yet fail to see the following:

1. Firefox is another application my staff will have to maintain; not all corporate sites are geared to use it, and when something inevitably fails to work with it, my users will complain.
2. You're merely stating that there are cost savings by using php+mysql instead of activex+mssql. Just stating such does not make it so. If an organisation already has MS-trained developers, then surely, MS-based solution will be cheaper.
3. Security does not automatically grant you an unassailable mandate to change things. While needs of security must be taken into account at all times, at the end, it's the business-side requirements that will drive IT. By forcing all aspects of business to be subservient to security needs, we cause the tail to wag the dog.

Lest you think I don't care about security -- my professional experience has been securing applications in a financial environment.

Re:Wrong Problem

[nessus42]

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.

Well, this n00b has been using Unix for 27 years, I can assert most assuredly that Linux *is* Unix. Perhaps not by legal trademark, but by functionality it is, and in that regard, it's closer to Unix than many varieties of Unix(tm) are to Unix.

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

|>oug

Re:Wrong Problem

[Gnavpot]

Did I miss a design criteria that states that Linux is designed to meet unix specs? I don't recall seeing one...

Did I miss a design criteria that states that IE is designed to meet W3C standards? I don't recall seeing one...

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.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Planned Obsolescence

[Doc Ruby]

This problem is exactly what people predicted back in the mid 1990s, when W3C was formed. I was on the IETF HTTP-WG, and even those of us on various corporate payrolls knew Microsoft's membership in a closed-door W3C membership meant Web standards would go this way.

It's a testament to the basic strength, openness and simplicity of the WWW that the W3C could continue its model for so long without collapsing itself or the Web.

Re:Planned Obsolescence

[hixie]

Microsoft have absolutely nothing to do with any of the problems that are listed in the article.

Re:Planned Obsolescence

[hixie]

I'm a W3C member, have been for years. Microsoft is not the source of the problems there. The closed-door membership is a problem, but that's not Microsoft's fault. Nor have Microsoft attempted to abuse their position in the W3C in the past decade or so (there was an instance a long time ago, but that was quickly resolved and hasn't happened since). There are plenty of issues at the W3C, but they're not due to MS.

Re:Planned Obsolescence

[hixie]

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.

Re:Planned Obsolescence

[Doc Ruby]

You're not a member the way Microsoft is a member. That's the problem. MS didn't create the problem, but it has used it to its advantage.

Tell me about DHTML and IE compatibility. Or general MS compliance. They certainly do help shepherd the W3C along standards directions that they prefer to beat with proprietary versions. That's what "embrace and extend" means, which has been MS's strategy since they publicly reprioritized the Internet and joined the new W3C.

I don't know how you could be part of the W3C and not see that. But those kind of scope blinders are part of the MS advantage in the way they use the W3C to game the system they've mastered.

Re:Planned Obsolescence

[hixie]

Everything you've described is completely unrelated to the grievances that Bjoern listed in his mail which was the impetus for the Slashdot posting. I'm not saying that Microsoft is competent at writing browsers that are compliant (heck, just look at the Acid2 test in IE vs any other browser), but I *am* saying that the problems *at the W3C* have nothing to do with Microsoft, and could be solved, regardless of what Microsoft do.

(BTW, in case you think I might be some sort of Microsoft apologist: I think it's pretty clear from my life over the past few years that I'm not on Microsoft's "side" here.)

Re:Planned Obsolescence

[mabhatter654]

The whole problem is that the W3C needs corp interest, patents, and money to stay in the game. If the W3C had to go it alone, all the individual corporate "members" would gut it like a fish in the courts. The current problem is that they've stopped writing good, simple, clean specs. With all the corporate interest the specs end up being one of two things: a) a "weapon" to punish who ever is on top of an industry a the moment by the threat of making it all "free" or b) attempt to skew the specs so only corporate developers could ever actually implement the whole thing. The result is that the specs are too big to be useful, so the big players all do their own thing anyway.. just how companies like Adobe, MS, IBM, etc would like it. I'm sure it's not deliberate on the part of individual contributing developers, but when the companies don't actively back up the results of the work with shipping products (like IE which hasn't been improved for 5 years!!!) everybody "knows" where the priorities like and nothing gets DONE.

Re:Planned Obsolescence

[Doc Ruby]

I already pointed out how Microsoft's abuse of its W3C membership and the W3C's structure makes the Web worse and weakens the W3C. Regardless of whether Höhrmann complained about them specifically, it's true. But that's just a response to your defense of MS after I mentioned how their membership behind the closed door signaled today's inevitable mess to us a decade ago.

MS was our tipoff. They are not unique. They are just one of the corporate paymasters creating conflicts and system games from which the W3C cannot escape with its closed-door membership. Which is the general description that Höhrmann did mention.

Grassroots efforts do exist...

[Cherita Chen]

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

Slow and cumbersome

[Null Nihils]

One thing that bugs me about the W3C is their apparent lack of recognition for newer extensions to Web technology. They seem to keep leaving a huge gap in what Web standards support while companies like Microsoft implement a closed, proprietary, platform-dependent kludge to provide that functionality. Its understandable that a cross-platform, developer-friendly solution for new capabilities should take time, but the W3C seems 15 years behind everything. Web Standards are indeed in a sorry state, and have been for some time. Just getting people to recognize the CSS standard is a headache, and things like rounded corners are still a long way off.

This is one area that a more open, participatory model is sorely needed. Look how far the Linux kernel has come in the past 15 years! And then look how far Web standards have come... not far, in my opinion (The CSS 3 spec is taking how long? And will get implemented in most browsers when?)

I think we, developers and Web-savvy alike, can do much better. But we have a lot of work to do... the Web has become very balkanized but it is still a market that has more wiggle-room than, say, the Operating System market. After all, Firefox is has gained significant marketshare and it still seems to be growing...

At any rate, TFA's seem to be punctuating a sentiment that will hopefully motivate people to move Web Standards forward sooner, rather than later.

Re:Slow and cumbersome

[Bogtha]

the W3C seems 15 years behind everything.

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.

Just getting people to recognize the CSS standard is a headache, and things like rounded corners are still a long way off.

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?

The CSS 3 spec is taking how long?

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."

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.

Re:Slow and cumbersome

[hixie]

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.

standards shmandards

[The Queen]

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.

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:All hail Flash.

[Anonymous Coward]

As a designer, why should I give a damn about the W3C and its standards when the W3C can't even get it together?

As an user without a broadband connection, why should I give a damn about a site written in Flash that takes several minutes to load when almost every other site uses plain HTML?

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:All hail Flash.

[GotenXiao]

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.

Re:All hail Flash.

[Xugumad]

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?

The w3c isn't relavant anyway....

[haplo21112]

...they are way behind the curve, the innovations and recommendations for standards of the innovations have no parity. The largest market share holder for browsers doesn't fully support the recommendations anyway, and appears not to have any intention to in the newar future. Even when a recommendation is published and closely followed much of it never makes sense to anyone except its designers.

Inorder to be fully usuable a recommendation should have examples throught of making use of the things being documented and much more explict definations of what is expected output/results of making use of an element of the recommendation. But alas NO....

Even the people's Champion Mozilla/Gecko/Firefox does fully, cleanly and totally impliment recommendations that have existed for years. And even if it did the 8000lb gorilla does even less in the standards compliance department. Mean hell the java/ecmascript standard hasn't changed much in years and it still reqires hacks to support both browsers at once.

CSS is even worse...hell they don't even in all cases provide the same events support, and how long has that been standardized.

Nope the w3c will remain ineffectual (which in my opinion probably contributes to their lackadaisical attitude) until the standards start getting properly, cleanly and fully implimented, otherwise whats the point of having standards and/or improving them.

The current state of things is like having 3 almost indentical light blubs, one that is designed to the socket (works pretty much all the time), one that is a hair to small for the socket (works for the most part but once in while due to climate variations loses contact, sputters a little might need adjustment from time to time to keep working), and one that is a hair to wide (you can get it into the socket but it might crack doing so and need to be fixed/replaced alot, might need s a little forcing to get lit up in the first place).

Adobe and standards

[truthsearch]

Right, the same Adobe that had a well known university professor arrested for making a speech? Yeah, they have my vote for overlord...

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. Or go help start a new standards organization. Your solution isn't a solution. It just contributes to the problems.

Re:Adobe and standards

[supabeast!]

"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.

W3C can't win here

[Opportunist]

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.

Tim B-L

[Alomex]

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.

This 'problem' started in the mid-90s

[DeeDob]

As a developper, i never knew what to aim for when designing web pages. Even in the mid-90s so this is nothing new.

I develop my pages for Netscape or for IE or for what the W3C says it SHOULD be.

Result: I developped for IE first, then made it work for Netscape and never bothered with the W3C.
Clients and people don't need code that works as "standard" when no one is able to correctly view the results of that "standard".

IE had some proprietary elements working. I remember however that the W3C had no "standards" for those functions. The standards came later and the W3C said that the way Microsoft implemented those features was "wrong". As Microsoft, do you really want to re-code your thing because someone came with a standard too late?
Same thing with Netscape and it's DHTML vision of "layers". The W3C standard came too late and Netscape's "layers" were deprecated. Developper's work going to waste as they have to re-invent the wheel.

When a company sees a customer need and fulfill it, why do the W3C need to analyze that need afterwards and come up with a totally different version of what's already available instead of expanding on it? It just waste the browsers developpers time and the web designers time so much that nobody cares about the standards anymore.

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:Bureaucracy sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Anybody who ever tried Amaya would agree with you, no product, at least not a usable one.

Esoteric?

[Infonaut]

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.

Really?

[javachip]

I think if you can get Opera and Mozilla on board, then I think Microsoft will be forced to follow.

Really?

Re:All hail Flash.

[Chelloveck]

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.

From a business perspective:

1. First, who cares? As long as I can use it to achieve my end, what difference does it make whether it's open or closed?
2. Second, proprietary is better. You only have to target a single platform without worrying about quirks of different interpretations of the spec. There is only one interpretation, and only one player to worry about supporting.
3. Third, 99% of the people run either Windows or OSX. So 1% doesn't get my message. I don't care. Reaching that 1% is not worth doubling the development and support costs.

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.

One more reason why...

[Dracos]

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).

Re:Puh Leaze

[ngibbins]

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.

Re:All hail Flash.

[QuasiEvil]

Oh hell, let's just call it a day and turn the WWW into the W3D - World Wide Word Doc. That's what many corporate intranets have become anyway - talk about incompatibility and complete lack of usefulness. I've spent hours and hours trying to convince people that a Wiki is a fairly good tool for collaboratively building documentation. My own group didn't need much prodding, since we're mostly a Unix and embedded group, but everyone else has been a challenge.

The argument from others was, "Why can't I just use Word? Why can't I make this text use blue *insert stupid looking font here*?" It's nearly impossible to convey to them that when it comes to documentation, it's about organization and content, and there's nothing that beats writing and publishing in essentially plain text. It forces the author to think more about clear, logical content, and in the end, allows it to be used on any platform and to be easily searched.

Flash is much the same way in my book. Most of the websites I've seen that use it extensively have poor content or organization and are trying to make up for it with whiz bang neato bits made with Flash. Need a menu? Guess what, there are great ways to either do that with pure HTML or a combination of DHTML and Javascript. Why do people feel obcessed to implement simple things in complex and incompatible ways?

WC3 out of touch with the needs of users

[edxwelch]

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

on a tangential note..

[sshore]

Know what a swedish lightsaber sounds like?

Björnnnn!

Re:All hail Flash.

[flooey]

Why do people feel obcessed to implement simple things in complex and incompatible ways?

Complex, possibly, but Flash is far from incompatible in the modern Internet. The most recent numbers from Macromedia (which may not be entirely accurate, but probably aren't all that far off) are that if you restrict yourself to Flash 6, you can reach 97% of the world's end users. Assuming that's accurate, if your site works properly on both Internet Explorer and Firefox, but not on Opera or Konquerer, you would have more people for whom your site breaks than if you had put it together in Flash.

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:Zeldman is Exaggerating

[I'm Schepers]

"While your analysis of the e-mail is astute..."

With all dues respect, I wasn't referring to Bjoern's email, as I explicitly stated. I was only addressing Mr. Zeldman's claims on his uncommentable blog. And I didn't miss his larger point; in fact, I contrasted it directly with my own personal experiences.

I think it's a shame that you and others have felt locked out of the input process for some specifications. I think this should be addressed. I don't know how much more clearly I can state that. That being said, the Working Groups I'm in (one of them being WebAPIs, with Bjoern and Hixie) are trying very hard to be responsive. Time is at a premium for all of us, but we do take input seriously.

As for publishing standards that other people wrote... many would argue that that is the entire point of a standards body. Some think that *no* language design should take place inside a standards body, only standardization of existing implementations and practices to ensure interoperability. That is almost the entire goal of the WHATWG specs that you cite, in fact. (Back me up here, Hixie?) I prefer a mix of standardization and innovation myself, and that's what I bring to the table.

Also, it's worth noting that the organizations you now look to for innovation and leadership take an active role in the W3C! That's how and why it works.

Huh. Jeffrey Zeldman linked to my blog.

[DZR]

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

Re:best of both

[hixie]

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.

Re:All hail Flash.

[MonsoonDawn]

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.

The W3C should focus more on design

[PapayaSF]

Very good points, and it relates to my gripe about the W3C: it shortchanges design.

When the web was invented (thanks, Tim) its academic/scientific roots were plain, and unsurprisingly it seemed best suited for putting scientific papers online. Soon designers got more control over type and layout in the form of "tag soup" and tables for layout. Most page layouts involve multiple columns and headers and footers, and we could usually achieve that with nested tables. Plus, pages could be made "liquid," adjusting to the width of the browser window and expanding to fit the content: e.g., more content in the center cells would automatically push the footer down. And this worked (more or less) the same way in all browsers. Huzzah!

Then we got CSS, and many new things, especially involving type, became possible. Huzzah again! And yet in abandoning tables for layout, some things became harder: the creation of a multi-column page, with header and footer, that automatically resizes to window width and adjusts in length according to content, and works the same way in all browsers, is considered a difficult problem even by authors of CSS books! Why has this basic issue not been addressed by a standards committee? Perhaps the focus on separating content and presentation and on accessibility has resulted in shortchanging the presentation side of things?

And why can't content automatically overflow from one div/column to the next, as it can in every page layout program of the last 20+ years? And why don't we have a standard way of embedding a typeface in a web page, so that users can see actual text in the exact font the designer wants, beyond the bare handful that are common to all Windows/Mac/Linux users? I'm sure any web designer could add to this list.

Those are the sort of issues I wish the W3C were working on. Instead, they've spent a huge effort on accessibility for the disabled, and what we seem to have gotten out of it is a set of complex, unworkable guidelines. I don't want to seem heartless, but I'd like to see greater emphasis on standards for enhancing presentation for the majority of us who aren't disabled.

Re:best of both

[hixie]

I can think of very few elements that have been deprecated from HTML and have actually stopped being used. Off-hand I can think of maybe four, and even those, people still use them often enough that browsers have to implement them, and still have to fix bugs with them. Introducing an element that does the same as another element but is not supported in existing browsers would just make life for browser vendors expensive without making the Web a particularly better place.

<blockquote> is a separate element because it has to contain blocks. <blockcode> does not, <blockcode> is only allowed to contain code. Thus <blockcode> is just like a <pre> block that contains code -- <pre><code> -- whereas a <blockquote> is like a quote that contains multiple blocks -- something which you can't do with an inline element like <q>.

The HTML5 spec will (or already does, I forget) say that <pre><code> is how you do a block of code. So it will no longer be a hack, it'll be the rule.

If you have concrete examples of how HTML5 fails to fix HTML's "brokenness", I urge you to send them to the WHATWG list, where they will be taken into consideration. http://www.whatwg.org/mailing-list