4 ms·

The IETF has shown it's self less prone to rubber stamping. W3C is a whole other case. Problem is unlike IETF which anyone can chime in on a standard. W3C is me

• tialaramex 7y ago
  The W3C was conceived from the outset for corporations. It even has the word consortium in its name. Personal membership was added much later. It's actual normal for Standards Organizations to look like this. If anything by their standards the W3C is very liberal. ISO's members are UN member states for example. Want a delegation to ISO to disagree with how an ISO standard works? Create a sovereign entity, seize control over an appreciable amount of the world and force other sovereign entities to accept you as an equal or you can't. The SI units are controlled by Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures which only has countries as members - some countries don't even get full membership. Don't like the kilogram? Unless you are literally a country too bad. The IETF is the far outlier, it might even question whether it is indeed a Standards Organization at all. After all it doesn't have any members, (the Internet Society has members but the IETF does not) and so perhaps its "standards" are only "standard" the way English is standard: a bunch of loose conventions, some honoured more consistently than others. Nobody pretends there's a "Standards Organization" for English after all.