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> Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), for instance, has been a critical governance body for the Web’s technical standards, enabling similar user expe

> Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), for instance, has been a critical governance body for the Web’s technical standards, enabling similar user experience across servers and browsers I'm all for real standards, and believe W3C has acted in good faith, but in what shape is W3C's standardization process now (hint: they cancelled the HTML 5.3 and SVG 2 spec) and where has it lead us?

tialaramex 7y ago
As its name hints the Consortium is intended as a way for organisations to work together. This seemed like a natural fit for the Web which had all these exciting startups in the Valley and around the world. If you look at something like the IETF where notionally all participation is individual and organisations are acknowledged only as the employer of an individual contributor you see plenty of stuff getting done that is blatantly, even explicitly, done on behalf of that employer. So why not cut out the middle man? But it turns out that's probably the wrong shape. While some stuff at IETF would get done by "any Google employee" or "any Microsoft employee" or "any Cisco employee" plenty of stuff that actually gets done is because one or more specific people cared about it, regardless of their employer or occasionally even if they don't have one. For years it was literally impossible to work on W3C standards as an individual. They eventually fixed that, but the message sent echoes forever, "Go away, we don't care". I like Tim (he is a nerd, he used to derail our apparently serious board-level meetings with his IT problems), but my impression is that one of the things that lead to the W3C was that Tim could see from pretty early on (certainly by the time W3C is founded) that there's a lot of cash sloshing about for his Web, and of course it's the nature of the beast that Tim doesn't automatically get a slice. That's part of the reason other systems didn't get traction - nobody wants to pay a toll. The W3C is a way for Tim to get some of that money for his pet projects.
fauigerzigerk 7y ago
Where we are now is not necessarily where the standardisation process has led us. There's a very powerful tech oligopoly that has taken over some time ago. I'm not sure there's anything the W3C alone could have done to prevent that, even if they hadn't made any of the mistakes they have made.
TheRealPomax 7y ago
You know _why_ they cancelled HTML 5.3, right? A different group had (what the world at least concluded was) better ideas for HTML5, took the spec, declared it "living" rather than versioned, and declared itself the authority on HTML. For a while that meant we had _two_ HTML 5 specs, at odds with each other, and eventually W3C had no choice but to acknowledge their coup had succeeded (for better or for worse) because the world ended up siding with WhatWG instead of W3C. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML#Transition_of_HTML_Publication_to_WHATWG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML#Transition_of_HTML_Public...
- tannhaeuser 7y ago
  WHATWG formed as an initiative of browser vendors to collaborate on new browser functionality and other stuff that needed coordination, and there's nothing wrong with that. The problem now is this has led the web stack to be defined by a closed club with fewer and fewer members, with incentives not necessarily aligned with users. But the web isn't just a browser vendor's gamble; it's used for vital communication and documentation in business, education, administration, media, science, law, medicine, etc. If we want to depend on the web (and spend billions on it), then there ought to be some representation and participation, since there clearly is public interest, and possibly funding. Maybe people looked at W3C to organize these interests, but indeed W3C has failed this expectation by statue. What they're doing instead is publishing redacted WHATWG snapshots (and have announced to not even do any redaction in the future). In other words, they're publishing work-in-progress collaborative documents without significant contributions and editorial. Having a point of reference is still something I guess (I'm even basing my HTML 5.x SGML DTDs on W3C's snapshots [1]) but not advancing the interest of web users, which W3C should have made their goal. [1]: http://sgmljs.net/docs/html52.html http://sgmljs.net/docs/html52.html
  - TheRealPomax 7y ago
    This seems a false, or at least uninformed, statement. WhatWG is just as closed as W3C was: the discussions are public, and anyone can contribute to them. Is there a hurdle that you need to overcome to show you actually care enough before you're allowed to participate? Sure. But it's the kind of hurdle that anyone with an email address can overcome. You're not excluded just because you don't work for "a browser vendor". Also, it feels like you're confusing the end user with the developers. Business, education, admininstration, media, science, law, medicine, etc. are all fields that rely on the web _through_ browsers and browser components, made by browser vendors. Whether that's IE6, or WebKit, or Electron, or Android Webview. So yes: the browser vendors are absolutely the people primarily pulling the strings, and pushing the envelope, which makes a whole lot of sense: it's their collective product they're curating.

tialaramex 7y ago

As its name hints the Consortium is intended as a way for organisations to work together. This seemed like a natural fit for the Web which had all these exciting startups in the Valley and around the world. If you look at something like the IETF where notionally all participation is individual and organisations are acknowledged only as the employer of an individual contributor you see plenty of stuff getting done that is blatantly, even explicitly, done on behalf of that employer. So why not cut out the middle man? But it turns out that's probably the wrong shape. While some stuff at IETF would get done by "any Google employee" or "any Microsoft employee" or "any Cisco employee" plenty of stuff that actually gets done is because one or more specific people cared about it, regardless of their employer or occasionally even if they don't have one. For years it was literally impossible to work on W3C standards as an individual. They eventually fixed that, but the message sent echoes forever, "Go away, we don't care". I like Tim (he is a nerd, he used to derail our apparently serious board-level meetings with his IT problems), but my impression is that one of the things that lead to the W3C was that Tim could see from pretty early on (certainly by the time W3C is founded) that there's a lot of cash sloshing about for his Web, and of course it's the nature of the beast that Tim doesn't automatically get a slice. That's part of the reason other systems didn't get traction - nobody wants to pay a toll. The W3C is a way for Tim to get some of that money for his pet projects.

fauigerzigerk 7y ago

Where we are now is not necessarily where the standardisation process has led us. There's a very powerful tech oligopoly that has taken over some time ago. I'm not sure there's anything the W3C alone could have done to prevent that, even if they hadn't made any of the mistakes they have made.

TheRealPomax 7y ago

You know _why_ they cancelled HTML 5.3, right? A different group had (what the world at least concluded was) better ideas for HTML5, took the spec, declared it "living" rather than versioned, and declared itself the authority on HTML. For a while that meant we had _two_ HTML 5 specs, at odds with each other, and eventually W3C had no choice but to acknowledge their coup had succeeded (for better or for worse) because the world ended up siding with WhatWG instead of W3C. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML#Transition_of_HTML_Publication_to_WHATWG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML#Transition_of_HTML_Public...

tannhaeuser 7y ago
WHATWG formed as an initiative of browser vendors to collaborate on new browser functionality and other stuff that needed coordination, and there's nothing wrong with that. The problem now is this has led the web stack to be defined by a closed club with fewer and fewer members, with incentives not necessarily aligned with users. But the web isn't just a browser vendor's gamble; it's used for vital communication and documentation in business, education, administration, media, science, law, medicine, etc. If we want to depend on the web (and spend billions on it), then there ought to be some representation and participation, since there clearly is public interest, and possibly funding. Maybe people looked at W3C to organize these interests, but indeed W3C has failed this expectation by statue. What they're doing instead is publishing redacted WHATWG snapshots (and have announced to not even do any redaction in the future). In other words, they're publishing work-in-progress collaborative documents without significant contributions and editorial. Having a point of reference is still something I guess (I'm even basing my HTML 5.x SGML DTDs on W3C's snapshots [1]) but not advancing the interest of web users, which W3C should have made their goal. [1]: http://sgmljs.net/docs/html52.html http://sgmljs.net/docs/html52.html
- TheRealPomax 7y ago
  This seems a false, or at least uninformed, statement. WhatWG is just as closed as W3C was: the discussions are public, and anyone can contribute to them. Is there a hurdle that you need to overcome to show you actually care enough before you're allowed to participate? Sure. But it's the kind of hurdle that anyone with an email address can overcome. You're not excluded just because you don't work for "a browser vendor". Also, it feels like you're confusing the end user with the developers. Business, education, admininstration, media, science, law, medicine, etc. are all fields that rely on the web _through_ browsers and browser components, made by browser vendors. Whether that's IE6, or WebKit, or Electron, or Android Webview. So yes: the browser vendors are absolutely the people primarily pulling the strings, and pushing the envelope, which makes a whole lot of sense: it's their collective product they're curating.