7 ms·

W3C to become a public-interest non-profit organization

190 points by jacooper 4y ago

ivarv 4y ago
I wonder if this means they will reconsider their "Encrypted Media Extensions" spec. I lost all respect for the organization when that passed. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/open-letter-w3c-director-ceo-team-and-membership https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/open-letter-w3c-direct...
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  That was also the first thing on my mind. And I almost lost respect for Sir Tim for giving tacit assent. I would like to hear more from people connected with W3C over the years as to why it ran into the long grass. Some commentators have even described it as "irrelevant today". I'd like to think that's wrong and W3C has an important future keeping a public and accessible World Wide Web alive. Among the many questions in my head: What is the "Web" today, 30 years on? What can the W3C realistically do to steward it? Have principles of universality and accessibility been abandoned? Can there be a WORLD WIDE Web in the age of state firewalls and the "splinternet"? Does the W3C have overlays and censorship resistance on its roadmap? Does the W3C recognise the need for Small Internet technologies, Gemini and suchlike as a reliable, accessible and simple information delivery network?
- the_other 4y ago
  Would the web have survived as a "popular" destination without EME? I imagine that the w3c saw that large corporations had most of the attention of most netizens. Those large content producers/distributers want DRM. Did the w3c fear that if they hadn't accepted EME, most of those netizens would move off the web and onto the native apps which the video streaming companies would, inevitably, have produced? I say "inevitably" because most of them stream to native and web anyway these days, and in many cases the native apps are wrappers around HTML5 players. In a way, the w3c's acceptance of EME allowed its reach to extend to more devices, where if they hadn't taken EME on the web may have shrunk. (I'm kinda just thinking out loud here. Sorry for the rambling)
  - blip54321 4y ago
    Yes, the web would have survived. Streaming is a tiny portion of what the web is used for. Even so, entertainment should be... entertaining. I got free Paramount Plus with my phone service. It has DRM, adblocker-detectors, and all sorts of other nonsense to where it usually doesn't play videos. I went with Youtube over Star Trek. That's not an ideological choice; it's just not entertaining to fight with computers to play a video or to talk to support. I suspect the effect would have been the opposite: a more rapid decline of the major content producers. This stuff needs to be easy and to work. Netflix did that, before everyone started to jump ship. Napster did it well too. At some point, there's a spiral, where: - Declining usability / quality leads to declining viewership - Declining viewership leads to declining budget - Declining budget lead to declining usability / quality and more pressure on monetization ... and so on. That's the disruption S-curve. In retrospect, I'm guessing that would have happened if large content producers forced apps.
    - lelandfe 4y ago
      > Streaming is a tiny portion of what the web is used for. By bandwidth, streaming is what the majority of the web is used for. PDF warning: https://www.sandvine.com/hubfs/downloads/phenomena/2018-phenomena-report.pdf https://www.sandvine.com/hubfs/downloads/phenomena/2018-phen... > Video is almost 58% of the total downstream volume of traffic on the internet
      - parrellel 4y ago
        But video is probably the most data-intensive thing most people interact with. How many webpages, books, songs, pdfs is equivalent to a 4 minute 1080p Youtube video?
  - pornel 4y ago
    The EME spec is a useless junk. It describes a fictional architecture that no browser has implemented. It's not possible to use it for any actual DRM implementation — if it was, it wouldn't be DRM! The authors of the spec are on the record saying they would never use the implementation described in the spec. The real specs that all the browsers and media vendors used for DRM are vendor-specific closely guarded secrets, as they have always been. The only purpose the spec ever had was laundering DRM with W3C's reputation.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  Refusing to spec it would have just given us another two decades of Flash-equivalent hell. Developers want features, and you can either provide a road-map for making them cross-compatible and specified or you can refrain from doing so (at which point developers will do whatever, and then some private company will provide a closed-source solution, every browser will support it because it provides a service end-users want, and instead of any piece of the story being open the whole story will be closed and it'll be a quarter century before something standardized replaces it well enough to uproot the de-facto closed standard).
  - klez 4y ago
    Right. I think more likely than not Chrome would have implemented their own extension and it would have become the de-facto standard. Maybe Apple would have resisted and we would have two solutions.
    - ldjb 4y ago
      If browser vendors want to create their own DRM extensions, then that's on them. But it seems to me that the W3C went too far in including DRM capability within the standards for the web. The end result may be comparable, but I think the principle of it is important.
      - Blikkentrekker 4y ago
        Principled men achieve nothing and make the word a worse place for both themselves and those whom they care about. “principles” is another word for being irrational and nonstrategic.
      - shadowgovt 4y ago
        It's on them and on web developers, who then have to deal with a balkanized client space without even the courtesy of a standard to allow the page to detect whether a given decryptor is available.
    - ttybird2 4y ago
- criddell 4y ago
  Why would they? I can’t imagine the dues-pay-members are going to change their mind on that.
- Blikkentrekker 4y ago
  The W.3.C. is already powerless when it made that move; it would be even more powerless if it didn't. That situation truly opened my eyes to the fact that for most people, pragmatic arguments of the kind of “We cannot stop drugs anyway, so we better legalize it, so we can better regulate it.” really seem to only apply when they already agree and that the same people who say it in one case suddenly are staunchly against such pragmaticism when it no longer fly their way. d.r.m. would be there regardless of what the W.3.C. would do and at the time the lesser of two evils was certainly the W.3.C. having control over the specification to some degree. I didn't know actually the E.F.F. had such a position, I felt it was the last agent in internet transparency and freedom that hadn't gone insane. It's a sad thing to read but I won't be donating to it any more if such is it's modus operandī.
ilamont 4y ago
W3C is jointly hosted by the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT CSAIL) in the United States, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) headquartered in France, Keio University in Japan and Beihang University in China. Beihang University spends roughly 60% of its research budget on defense research (https://www.aspi.org.au/report/china-defence-universities-tracker https://www.aspi.org.au/report/china-defence-universities-tr...). The People's Republic of China has done everything it can to shut down the open Web (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/chinas-global-reach-surveillance-and-censorship-beyond-great-firewall https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/chinas-global-reach-su...) while turning digital platforms, communications networks, and other technologies into tools of mass control and surveillance. Why is Beihang involved in hosting the W3C?
- Iv 4y ago
  More than the military budget, the reluctance to let the population access an unfiltered internet is problematic. The CCP is trying to create a separate network from the global one, this raises many questions.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  Probably because it's a representative from a country with 18% of the total people on the planet. Hard to call oneself a standards community if you're missing representation from nearly a fifth of all users.
  - ilamont 4y ago
    Then why isn't one of the IITs on the list? Or a university in South America, Africa, or the Middle East?
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      Excellent questions.
      - 4y ago
tannhaeuser 4y ago
I do have respect for TBL's achievements, but honestly I don't see the purpose of the W3C, and also have never seen the justification for burning public money into W3C's pay-as-you-go org, before or after this change. Let's take a look at what W3C did lately, shall we? W3C HTML 5.2 was published in 2017, based on WHATWG material. W3C HTML 5.3 was "published" as merely a commit vs WHATWG's HTML repo with a promise to keep further sanctioned snapshots, which didn't happen though. How could a snapshot of WHATWG's phonebook-sized "living standard" thing be consistent and deserving of the "standard" badge anyway? CSS being such a crap specification, and absurdly outside its scope, the only reason of its existence seems to be an organizational stalemate, where Google let W3C have some token significance in web specs and give long-term CSS editors job security. At the cost of giving up any mental discipline, and even versioning, with the goal of encumbering the web to the point of no return. The state of web browsers is so abysmal, it could hardly be any worse. That situation should've been avoided by a competent real standardization body. But TBL is busy with completely irrelevant stuff such as XML and RDF. Sorry TBL, you might be a nice guy and tinkerer, but a manager you're not. Time to take standardization to ISO or another "real" standardization body.
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  I see the purpose of the W3C easily. I'd love to have a non-commercial cooperative entity determining web standards. I agree with you it hasn't been accomplishing it very well though.
- derf_ 4y ago
  > Time to take standardization to ISO or another "real" standardization body. If you want to see how the web could be worse, do this. The ISO process is openly hostile to the development of royalty-free standards. You can direct a lot of criticism towards the W3C, but they got the patent policy right.
  - no_identd 4y ago
    ISO to me seems like an absolute nightterror of an organization. The Main-Moderator of https://old.reddit.com/r/iso9001 https://old.reddit.com/r/iso9001 runs a blog here: https://www.oxebridge.com/emma/latest-blog-posts/ https://www.oxebridge.com/emma/latest-blog-posts/ And almost every time I read anything from there, I just… Ugh. I don't even know where to start with describing the extent of just how much of a shitshow ISO represents. Edit, perhaps like this: After for many years intensely thinking about the organizational problems involved, I've come to a conclusion which seems rather very absurd to me: ISO could only deteriorate to this degree because of two things: 1. An absurd number of decades-long-standing bugs in Microsoft Word's Master Documents feature: http://www.addbalance.com/word/MasterDocHudson.htm http://www.addbalance.com/word/MasterDocHudson.htm. This tacitly yet tremendously increases the organisational costs of writing policy, process documentation, work instructions, &c. documents in a truly fully standardized manner (don't even get me started about ISO authoring tools, especially not about their internal ones. Microsoft Word Wizard .wiz files. I almost fell from my seat when I originally learned of that.); many of those working in pure IT organisations fail to realize this because there exist a lot of workarounds implementable when one has a large tech-affine workforce, but these workarounds don't work in large traditional enterprises. Some of those have invested in workarounds—most haven't, think they couldn't, and thus won't. 2. A feature parity gap in the file save dialog behaviors of Microsoft Excel (Filename suggestion doesN'T get pre-populated based on Document Title file metadata field) when compared to those of Microsoft Word (Filename suggestion DOES get pre-populated based on Document Title file metadata field). This makes semverdoc.org enforcement impossible in large organisations still stuck in e-mail–as–version–control–for–Microsoft–Excel–land, i.e. the majority of them, and There no replacement exists for Microsoft Excel in most large enterprises. Everything else seems like it just mostly comes down to sociopaths hiding behind cluelessly middle-managed misunderstandings. And the really sad thing: If said sociopaths really grok'd all of this, they'd probably do their damnest to undo this middle management incompetency compensation competence failure, because while it might seem like this ends up profiting /someone/, it actually does seem like it actually represents one of those rather very rare true loss–loss–loss scenarios. Come to think of it, see also: The subtle horror of IBM's Zachman Framework, as well as technical writing skills: https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=31896609 https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=31896609 Well… And then there's simply this comic: https://www.oxebridge.com/emma/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/06-04-2022-H.png https://www.oxebridge.com/emma/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/06...
ChrisArchitect 4y ago
I'm surprised the w3c wasn't already a non-profit, like this didn't come up 20 years ago when serious things with HTML were being discussed and battled over with various browser war entities in the mix etc? hm
- coderintherye 4y ago
  They were not previously incorporated, instead being a "consortium" The info on that is still up here: https://www.w3.org/Consortium/facts https://www.w3.org/Consortium/facts

190 points by jacooper 4y ago

I wonder if this means they will reconsider their "Encrypted Media Extensions" spec. I lost all respect for the organization when that passed. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/open-letter-w3c-director-ceo-team-and-membership https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/open-letter-w3c-direct...

nonrandomstring 4y ago
That was also the first thing on my mind. And I almost lost respect for Sir Tim for giving tacit assent. I would like to hear more from people connected with W3C over the years as to why it ran into the long grass. Some commentators have even described it as "irrelevant today". I'd like to think that's wrong and W3C has an important future keeping a public and accessible World Wide Web alive. Among the many questions in my head: What is the "Web" today, 30 years on? What can the W3C realistically do to steward it? Have principles of universality and accessibility been abandoned? Can there be a WORLD WIDE Web in the age of state firewalls and the "splinternet"? Does the W3C have overlays and censorship resistance on its roadmap? Does the W3C recognise the need for Small Internet technologies, Gemini and suchlike as a reliable, accessible and simple information delivery network?
the_other 4y ago
Would the web have survived as a "popular" destination without EME? I imagine that the w3c saw that large corporations had most of the attention of most netizens. Those large content producers/distributers want DRM. Did the w3c fear that if they hadn't accepted EME, most of those netizens would move off the web and onto the native apps which the video streaming companies would, inevitably, have produced? I say "inevitably" because most of them stream to native and web anyway these days, and in many cases the native apps are wrappers around HTML5 players. In a way, the w3c's acceptance of EME allowed its reach to extend to more devices, where if they hadn't taken EME on the web may have shrunk. (I'm kinda just thinking out loud here. Sorry for the rambling)
- blip54321 4y ago
  Yes, the web would have survived. Streaming is a tiny portion of what the web is used for. Even so, entertainment should be... entertaining. I got free Paramount Plus with my phone service. It has DRM, adblocker-detectors, and all sorts of other nonsense to where it usually doesn't play videos. I went with Youtube over Star Trek. That's not an ideological choice; it's just not entertaining to fight with computers to play a video or to talk to support. I suspect the effect would have been the opposite: a more rapid decline of the major content producers. This stuff needs to be easy and to work. Netflix did that, before everyone started to jump ship. Napster did it well too. At some point, there's a spiral, where: - Declining usability / quality leads to declining viewership - Declining viewership leads to declining budget - Declining budget lead to declining usability / quality and more pressure on monetization ... and so on. That's the disruption S-curve. In retrospect, I'm guessing that would have happened if large content producers forced apps.
  - lelandfe 4y ago
    > Streaming is a tiny portion of what the web is used for. By bandwidth, streaming is what the majority of the web is used for. PDF warning: https://www.sandvine.com/hubfs/downloads/phenomena/2018-phenomena-report.pdf https://www.sandvine.com/hubfs/downloads/phenomena/2018-phen... > Video is almost 58% of the total downstream volume of traffic on the internet
    - parrellel 4y ago
      But video is probably the most data-intensive thing most people interact with. How many webpages, books, songs, pdfs is equivalent to a 4 minute 1080p Youtube video?
- pornel 4y ago
  The EME spec is a useless junk. It describes a fictional architecture that no browser has implemented. It's not possible to use it for any actual DRM implementation — if it was, it wouldn't be DRM! The authors of the spec are on the record saying they would never use the implementation described in the spec. The real specs that all the browsers and media vendors used for DRM are vendor-specific closely guarded secrets, as they have always been. The only purpose the spec ever had was laundering DRM with W3C's reputation.
shadowgovt 4y ago
Refusing to spec it would have just given us another two decades of Flash-equivalent hell. Developers want features, and you can either provide a road-map for making them cross-compatible and specified or you can refrain from doing so (at which point developers will do whatever, and then some private company will provide a closed-source solution, every browser will support it because it provides a service end-users want, and instead of any piece of the story being open the whole story will be closed and it'll be a quarter century before something standardized replaces it well enough to uproot the de-facto closed standard).
- klez 4y ago
  Right. I think more likely than not Chrome would have implemented their own extension and it would have become the de-facto standard. Maybe Apple would have resisted and we would have two solutions.
  - ldjb 4y ago
    If browser vendors want to create their own DRM extensions, then that's on them. But it seems to me that the W3C went too far in including DRM capability within the standards for the web. The end result may be comparable, but I think the principle of it is important.
    - Blikkentrekker 4y ago
      Principled men achieve nothing and make the word a worse place for both themselves and those whom they care about. “principles” is another word for being irrational and nonstrategic.
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      It's on them and on web developers, who then have to deal with a balkanized client space without even the courtesy of a standard to allow the page to detect whether a given decryptor is available.
  - ttybird2 4y ago
criddell 4y ago
Why would they? I can’t imagine the dues-pay-members are going to change their mind on that.
Blikkentrekker 4y ago
The W.3.C. is already powerless when it made that move; it would be even more powerless if it didn't. That situation truly opened my eyes to the fact that for most people, pragmatic arguments of the kind of “We cannot stop drugs anyway, so we better legalize it, so we can better regulate it.” really seem to only apply when they already agree and that the same people who say it in one case suddenly are staunchly against such pragmaticism when it no longer fly their way. d.r.m. would be there regardless of what the W.3.C. would do and at the time the lesser of two evils was certainly the W.3.C. having control over the specification to some degree. I didn't know actually the E.F.F. had such a position, I felt it was the last agent in internet transparency and freedom that hadn't gone insane. It's a sad thing to read but I won't be donating to it any more if such is it's modus operandī.

ilamont 4y ago

W3C is jointly hosted by the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT CSAIL) in the United States, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) headquartered in France, Keio University in Japan and Beihang University in China. Beihang University spends roughly 60% of its research budget on defense research (https://www.aspi.org.au/report/china-defence-universities-tracker https://www.aspi.org.au/report/china-defence-universities-tr...). The People's Republic of China has done everything it can to shut down the open Web (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/chinas-global-reach-surveillance-and-censorship-beyond-great-firewall https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/chinas-global-reach-su...) while turning digital platforms, communications networks, and other technologies into tools of mass control and surveillance. Why is Beihang involved in hosting the W3C?

Iv 4y ago
More than the military budget, the reluctance to let the population access an unfiltered internet is problematic. The CCP is trying to create a separate network from the global one, this raises many questions.
shadowgovt 4y ago
Probably because it's a representative from a country with 18% of the total people on the planet. Hard to call oneself a standards community if you're missing representation from nearly a fifth of all users.
- ilamont 4y ago
  Then why isn't one of the IITs on the list? Or a university in South America, Africa, or the Middle East?
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    Excellent questions.
    - 4y ago

tannhaeuser 4y ago

I do have respect for TBL's achievements, but honestly I don't see the purpose of the W3C, and also have never seen the justification for burning public money into W3C's pay-as-you-go org, before or after this change. Let's take a look at what W3C did lately, shall we? W3C HTML 5.2 was published in 2017, based on WHATWG material. W3C HTML 5.3 was "published" as merely a commit vs WHATWG's HTML repo with a promise to keep further sanctioned snapshots, which didn't happen though. How could a snapshot of WHATWG's phonebook-sized "living standard" thing be consistent and deserving of the "standard" badge anyway? CSS being such a crap specification, and absurdly outside its scope, the only reason of its existence seems to be an organizational stalemate, where Google let W3C have some token significance in web specs and give long-term CSS editors job security. At the cost of giving up any mental discipline, and even versioning, with the goal of encumbering the web to the point of no return. The state of web browsers is so abysmal, it could hardly be any worse. That situation should've been avoided by a competent real standardization body. But TBL is busy with completely irrelevant stuff such as XML and RDF. Sorry TBL, you might be a nice guy and tinkerer, but a manager you're not. Time to take standardization to ISO or another "real" standardization body.

jrochkind1 4y ago
I see the purpose of the W3C easily. I'd love to have a non-commercial cooperative entity determining web standards. I agree with you it hasn't been accomplishing it very well though.
derf_ 4y ago
> Time to take standardization to ISO or another "real" standardization body. If you want to see how the web could be worse, do this. The ISO process is openly hostile to the development of royalty-free standards. You can direct a lot of criticism towards the W3C, but they got the patent policy right.
- no_identd 4y ago
  ISO to me seems like an absolute nightterror of an organization. The Main-Moderator of https://old.reddit.com/r/iso9001 https://old.reddit.com/r/iso9001 runs a blog here: https://www.oxebridge.com/emma/latest-blog-posts/ https://www.oxebridge.com/emma/latest-blog-posts/ And almost every time I read anything from there, I just… Ugh. I don't even know where to start with describing the extent of just how much of a shitshow ISO represents. Edit, perhaps like this: After for many years intensely thinking about the organizational problems involved, I've come to a conclusion which seems rather very absurd to me: ISO could only deteriorate to this degree because of two things: 1. An absurd number of decades-long-standing bugs in Microsoft Word's Master Documents feature: http://www.addbalance.com/word/MasterDocHudson.htm http://www.addbalance.com/word/MasterDocHudson.htm. This tacitly yet tremendously increases the organisational costs of writing policy, process documentation, work instructions, &c. documents in a truly fully standardized manner (don't even get me started about ISO authoring tools, especially not about their internal ones. Microsoft Word Wizard .wiz files. I almost fell from my seat when I originally learned of that.); many of those working in pure IT organisations fail to realize this because there exist a lot of workarounds implementable when one has a large tech-affine workforce, but these workarounds don't work in large traditional enterprises. Some of those have invested in workarounds—most haven't, think they couldn't, and thus won't. 2. A feature parity gap in the file save dialog behaviors of Microsoft Excel (Filename suggestion doesN'T get pre-populated based on Document Title file metadata field) when compared to those of Microsoft Word (Filename suggestion DOES get pre-populated based on Document Title file metadata field). This makes semverdoc.org enforcement impossible in large organisations still stuck in e-mail–as–version–control–for–Microsoft–Excel–land, i.e. the majority of them, and There no replacement exists for Microsoft Excel in most large enterprises. Everything else seems like it just mostly comes down to sociopaths hiding behind cluelessly middle-managed misunderstandings. And the really sad thing: If said sociopaths really grok'd all of this, they'd probably do their damnest to undo this middle management incompetency compensation competence failure, because while it might seem like this ends up profiting /someone/, it actually does seem like it actually represents one of those rather very rare true loss–loss–loss scenarios. Come to think of it, see also: The subtle horror of IBM's Zachman Framework, as well as technical writing skills: https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=31896609 https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=31896609 Well… And then there's simply this comic: https://www.oxebridge.com/emma/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/06-04-2022-H.png https://www.oxebridge.com/emma/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/06...

ChrisArchitect 4y ago

I'm surprised the w3c wasn't already a non-profit, like this didn't come up 20 years ago when serious things with HTML were being discussed and battled over with various browser war entities in the mix etc? hm

coderintherye 4y ago
They were not previously incorporated, instead being a "consortium" The info on that is still up here: https://www.w3.org/Consortium/facts https://www.w3.org/Consortium/facts