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Jeff Jaffe Named CEO of W3C
blozza2070 notes the news that Jeff Jaffe has been appointed CEO of the World Wide Web Consortium. Until January Jaffe was CTO at Novell and, while his name hasn't come up very often in this community, he is one of the architects of the Novell-Microsoft patent deal. A reading of Jaffe's blog while at Novell tends to paint him as a software patent supporter, Microsoft apologist, and no fan of the FSF. This strongly worded page at Boycott Novell features copious links to support the above characterization.
I have had queezy feelings about the W3C for some time now and this just makes them even sicker. At this point, I would rather almost have the FSF friendly browser makers create a standards body that is, well, for those people that are interested in open systems and not playing leverage games with it.
I reminded of what became of OpenGL, when a cool little company tried to make a nice standard for everybody and instead the whole thing got hammered by a bunch of egos until it was more or less abandoned in mainstream Windows based 3D rendering.
Finally, I wish people could see that patents and lengthy copyrights are less free market than what we have now. You can say a system is free market when it is really a hodge podge of government subsidies and monopoly grants. I would propose that FSF people start calling themselves Free Market Services, and simultaneously label closed shops as Government Regulated Services, which is really what they are.
This is my sig.
You've been asleep for the past couple of years: The WHATWG was formed in response to the W3C's slow pace on HTML standards development. After a few months of prodding the W3C took the point and subsumed the WHATWG's work on HTML5 (formerly Web Applications 1.0). The W3C has been making fine progress on HTML5 and CSS3 of late; whilst the WHATWG does still exist, it's only working on a handful of less-important specifications that won't impact the majority of web designers and developers.
As for the W3C, it's far from dead. If anything it's the WHATWG that's dying: none of their other projects have anywhere near the same community following HTML5 did.
How about we break away from the W3C and its strange policies and instead appoint a community-based chair with people from Mozilla, Apple, Opera, Google, Microsoft (if they would show) and anyone else who wanted to make a browser. I'm not really seeing the benefit of the W3C lately, and with this, why don't we just break away?
The main reason to not do that is that you probably won't get either the (main) browser makers or the users to show up. Without them, you're simply irrelevant. But if they do turn up, you've effectively got the W3C (with maybe a round of musical chairmanships at the top). Lot of fuss and bother to achieve nothing of value.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
So are you referring to IBM? Oracle? Intel?
Those three don't seem to have the online fanclub that Microsoft (or Apple for that matter) seem to have. The times I have seen stories about Oracle or Intel or IBM misbehaving, there were not nearly so many people who came out of the woodwork to defend them or make excuses for them as when a similar story appears about Microsoft. But for any who do this for the companies you mentioned, I'd say the same thing applies (leading me to wonder what your point was). If you are suggesting I am picking on Microsoft, I ask you one question: when it comes to abusive behavior that does not benefit the public, is the name of the corporation really important to you?
I personally feel no need to spend my time defending a corporation that has large budgets and legions of advertisers, PR people, and lawyers dedicated to giving it a good public image whether it actually deserves one or not. I have no rational explanation for the motives of people who do feel such a need. I suppose some of them may indeed be astroturfers but I don't think that's a satisfying explanation. It doesn't explain the genuine "fanboy" nature of much of this behavior, and I (would like to) think professional astroturfers could do a better job than most such posts I have seen on Slashdot. Personally I think it's typical "us against them" behavior like you see among sports fans who root for different teams, and about equally unsophisticated.
That I don't mention Linux or GPL'd software in general here is quite deliberate. I don't know of any authors of GPL'd software who are in a position to force their software or their standards on anyone. The very nature of it makes that difficult if not impossible. Therefore, there are no such abuses like embrace-and-extend coming from this group that would require apologists in the first place.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
The links between W3C and the corporations that actually implement technology used on the web are one of the things that make it useful as a standards body.
If the major vendors weren't involved in the standards body, it would be an academic exercise with no impact on the real world.
we developers are going to ignore their standards. its simple as that.
Bravo! Well said! In support of this stance, I'll be happy to take care of any of your clients that are foolish enough to want their websites to look and function similarly across all major browsers. Viva la revolucion!
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
But the problem is, they rarely do. Generally Microsoft's ideas start out just fine, then they play the patent card, extend features and end up with a product radically different than their specifications. The problem isn't that Microsoft is making the standards, it is just because in recent years Microsoft hasn't made a single, decent, workable standard without playing the patent card.
Agreed. It's not an issue of acceptability of standards. Microsoft has lots of talented employees to whom it could assign that task. It's an issue of trust. Time and again, this company has proven that it will act in its own interests (which is acceptable from a corporation) to the detriment of everyone else's interests (which is not acceptable from anyone).
Meanwhile, it has given few or no examples of honoring the purpose of open standards. There's simply no reason whatsoever to believe that this time they really intend to play fair and be honest, and by that I mean the-truth-and-the-whole-truth honesty. It's an amazing example of collective stupidity and/or a collective short memory that anyone even pretends this is a question. It might be comedic if it didn't cause so many complications for so many people.
Naturally Microsoft doesn't have to bear the cost of those complications. When it decided long ago that IE would not follow standards very well, this forced many Web developers to expend a great deal of extra effort to handle IE's incompatibilities. Let X equal the amount of time and effort it would take to design such a Web site for a single universal standard to which all browsers adhere. Let Y equal the (larger) amount of time and effort it took to design such a Web site that handles IE's intentional incompatibilities. Do you think Microsoft has ever had to pay for Y - X? In principle this makes them a lot like spammers, not in the sense that MS sends tons of unsolicited e-mails, but in the sense that others have to bear the cost of their marketing.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
What do you think the W3C is? It’s exactly that! And believe it or not, parts of the most important standards even came from Microsoft people. They are not all evil, you know.
I’m very happy that we now, for the first time, finally have all browsers support one single set of standards (XHTML 1.x / CSS 2.x / DOM 2 / JS), by listening to the W3C again. Instead of the chaos of the entire 90s and 00s!
What strange policies are you talking about? I find the work of the W3C nice. They care. Which is obvious, since they are the browser makers, amongst other interested groups.
Are you even a web developer?
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
It is fine to argue with Jeff's software philosophy, his use of buzz words in his blog, or his politics. But he is not an idiot MBA who doesn't know his way around a PC. He is a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE (for his technical contributions in algorithms and computer networks). He was a researcher before he became a corporate exec (see his publications at http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/indices/a-tree/j/Jaffe:Jeffrey_M=.html/ and http://portal.acm.org/results.cfm?coll=portal&dl=ACM&query=Jeffrey+M.+Jaffe&short=1/).
How about we break away from the W3C and its strange policies and instead appoint a community-based chair with people from Mozilla, Apple, Opera, Google, Microsoft (if they would show) and anyone else who wanted to make a browser.
Who is this 'we' you keep talking about?
The W3C is a Consortium (that's the 'C') consisting of interested industry members. Right now, businesses who care how web technologies are developed have a vested interest in sitting down together and at least going through the motions of standardising languages and protocols.
The W3C might have democratic mechanisms, but it is neither a populist nor a grassroots organisation. It is, and always has been, an industry body.
I honestly don't know why Tim Berners-Lee decided that an industry consortium would be the best means to achieve web standards. I do know, however, that he chose deliberately and only after consideration. I suppose he hoped that collective interests would trump selfish motives and, if that failed, that other companies could be relied on to reign in the more egregious abuses.
It needs to be said that, in this respect at least, the W3C has been largely successful, but only in the way that standards bodies generally are: Through endless, awkward compromises that sometimes defy reason, and often with only reluctant support from the very people who developed the standards in the first place.
The W3C was born at a time when Netscape Communications ruled the roost, and acted like they didn't need anyone else. Virtually all of the abominations of early 'Tag Soup' HTML can be laid at Netscape's feet. Following that, we saw years of tug-of-war spec development, in which MS and Netscape defined their competing and incompatible implementations of numerous new elements and attributes.
But the W3C persevered and (painfully) slowly managed to bring us back from the brink to HTML 4 and eventually XHTML. There've been some interesting manoeuvres of late regarding WHATWG and HTML 5, but most interesting is the fact that the 'Tag Soup' crew and other unilateralists are more often on the defensive than in control. Much of that - indeed much of the conventional wisdom that Web Standards are Good - is the result of the efforts of the W3C and its members.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.