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.'"

Re:I never understood..

[Shining Celebi]

Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, and Apple are all members of the W3C according to its members [w3.org] page.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Grassroots efforts do exist...

[Cherita Chen]

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

Re:Puh Leaze

[uchihalush]

Thats 6k only for Profit Free Organizations, its far more expensive for big companies. Though you are correct in that even at 65k/yr, it is pocket change for all large companies

Re:Why not the IETF?

[Pneuma ROCKS]

Actually, there already exists such an organization: the WHATWG [whatwg.org]. 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:Planned Obsolescence

[hixie]

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

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: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: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 [w3.org]

Re:Wrong Problem

[molarmass192]

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. At best, it's a mix of SystemV and Berkley UNIX-like features, but guess what, it doesn't make a lick of difference. What! Shock? Horror? No, as you pointed out with your careful choice of words, UNIX is a specification -NOT- a standard. That's a very crucial distinction. Standards are meant for ***interoperability***. Standards are what allows that precious IE of yours to work with the Apache web server. Hell, it's what allows Window's TCPIP stack to work on the internet. On the other hand a specification, is about ***portability***, NOT interoperability. Conform to a specification, and you can be pretty well ensured of portability. People bash IE because MS constantly tries to violate standards. If MS used IE to comply with standards, rather than subvert them, but failed to make IE conform to, say the Mozilla XUL specification, then you'd have a valid point.

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.

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/ [w3.org]
http://validator.w3.org/ [w3.org]
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ [w3.org]

All of these are front-page links at w3.org [slashdot.org].

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 [6thsenseanalytics.com], 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: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.

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: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: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.