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Note that OP (Robin Berjon) works for Filecoin, a crypto project that raised a huge ICO and has never really delivered on all of the promised hype. His full-tim

Note that OP (Robin Berjon) works for Filecoin, a crypto project that raised a huge ICO and has never really delivered on all of the promised hype. His full-time role is to get Filecoin's projects more embedded into standards like those the w3c oversees. And they obviously have specific opinions about how they'd like to see the w3c run. I would take a skeptical view of his take on what's happening. The w3c is a very dysfunctional organization and there has been a lot of turmoil internally. Jeff Jaffe who had been CEO for more than a decade quit in November. There are power plays behind the scenes to fill this vacuum.

naet 4y ago
W3C pushing crypto nonsense is in my opinion killing aby remaining respect for the organization. Stuff like the DID standards earlier this year are nonsense and were heavily objected by maintainers of Firefox and Chrome, but got pushed through anyways. Will they simply ignore W3C recommendations going forward? Seems likely to me. Unfortunately I'm not aware of any other organization working on a widely accepted list of web standards. https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2022/07/01/w3c_overrules_objections/ https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2022/07/01/w3c_overrules_obj...
- riedel 4y ago
  I am seeing currently w3c people pushing blockchain stuff in European cloud standardization activities. This really worrying me. This explains to me now why W3C seems so broken.
  - mardifoufs 4y ago
    I never quite understood why blockchain vaporware is so prevalent in europe. It is also popular in the US, sure, but it seems more embedded and at higher levels than in the EU. Is there a reason why? (I'm not necessarily talking about crypto coins specifically, more about blockchain as a technology in general)
  - ciupicri 4y ago
    What are you talking about?
  - google234123 4y ago
    one or two sources for this would be welcome
    - riedel 4y ago
      This is first account from meetings I attended as part of the big data value association with W3C presenting on technology convergence for data spaces. Alot was on DIDs which seem to be a pillar of the European Blockchain service infrastructure standardized by W3C [1] [1] https://www.eqar.eu/qa-results/synergies/european-blockchain-service-infrastructure-ebsi/ https://www.eqar.eu/qa-results/synergies/european-blockchain...
- tannhaeuser 4y ago
  > Unfortunately I'm not aware of any other organization working on a widely accepted list of web standards. Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but the HTML 5 spec is entirely the work of Ian Hickson/WHATWG (financed by Google), and has been for over ten years. Until about 2018 W3C has merely snapshotted, rubberstamped, and editorialized WHATWG's specs, and has since stopped doing even that, and now W3C's HTML5.2 spec has a banner retroactively redirecting you to WHATWG's current head [1]. W3C is involved via the CSS WG and ARIA still. But yeah, as a standardization body, W3C has failed spectacularly. There's no standard as such; WHATWG's "living standard" is merely a stagnant (yet still unversioned) memorandum of understanding of extant browser vendors (Google Chrome and Google-financed Mozilla plus Safari) to implement features, with a large part of browser APIs not implemented by FF and Safari due to fingerprinting concerns. [1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/2017/REC-html52-20171214/ https://www.w3.org/TR/2017/REC-html52-20171214/
  - echelon 4y ago
    Alternate interpretation: w3c's XHTML was machine understandable. It took great care to introduce rigid and reusable semantics. You could spider the web and directly extract facts without ML or heuristics. It spiritually brought HTML closer to RSS and RDF, and there would have been a lot you could do with that. Google didn't want anything to do with that future. Search is their moat. They pushed a format that is easy for humans to author, tolerably messy, and knowledgeless for machines. If the format was difficult to extract knowledge from in a scalable and reusable way, Google could keep their search kingdom. XHTML was a ladder rung into the semantic web. A distributed knowledge graph that could be mined, remixed, and extended with little effort. It was marginally harder to author (the mimetype issue was ridiculous), but extending it was low hanging fruit. This isn't necessarily how it went down, but the incentives do align. I do think we'd have more automation in the world today if we'd have adopted XHTML. Now with AI/ML and NLP I think we'll get to this kind of web without a format to rigidly specify semantics. I still have to think that the ideas of semantic web and P2P could have delivered decades ago if Google and Facebook hadn't overwhelmingly pushed the envelope on centralized resources.
    - zozbot234 4y ago
zagrebian 4y ago
His bio says Protocol Labs.
- thesausageking 4y ago
  Protocol Labs is the corporate entity behind Filecoin: https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2020/10/15/filecoin-launch-finally-brings-200m-ico-to-fruition/ https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2020/10/15/filecoin-launch-...

naet 4y ago

W3C pushing crypto nonsense is in my opinion killing aby remaining respect for the organization. Stuff like the DID standards earlier this year are nonsense and were heavily objected by maintainers of Firefox and Chrome, but got pushed through anyways. Will they simply ignore W3C recommendations going forward? Seems likely to me. Unfortunately I'm not aware of any other organization working on a widely accepted list of web standards. https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2022/07/01/w3c_overrules_objections/ https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2022/07/01/w3c_overrules_obj...

riedel 4y ago
I am seeing currently w3c people pushing blockchain stuff in European cloud standardization activities. This really worrying me. This explains to me now why W3C seems so broken.
- mardifoufs 4y ago
  I never quite understood why blockchain vaporware is so prevalent in europe. It is also popular in the US, sure, but it seems more embedded and at higher levels than in the EU. Is there a reason why? (I'm not necessarily talking about crypto coins specifically, more about blockchain as a technology in general)
- ciupicri 4y ago
  What are you talking about?
- google234123 4y ago
  one or two sources for this would be welcome
  - riedel 4y ago
    This is first account from meetings I attended as part of the big data value association with W3C presenting on technology convergence for data spaces. Alot was on DIDs which seem to be a pillar of the European Blockchain service infrastructure standardized by W3C [1] [1] https://www.eqar.eu/qa-results/synergies/european-blockchain-service-infrastructure-ebsi/ https://www.eqar.eu/qa-results/synergies/european-blockchain...
tannhaeuser 4y ago
> Unfortunately I'm not aware of any other organization working on a widely accepted list of web standards. Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but the HTML 5 spec is entirely the work of Ian Hickson/WHATWG (financed by Google), and has been for over ten years. Until about 2018 W3C has merely snapshotted, rubberstamped, and editorialized WHATWG's specs, and has since stopped doing even that, and now W3C's HTML5.2 spec has a banner retroactively redirecting you to WHATWG's current head [1]. W3C is involved via the CSS WG and ARIA still. But yeah, as a standardization body, W3C has failed spectacularly. There's no standard as such; WHATWG's "living standard" is merely a stagnant (yet still unversioned) memorandum of understanding of extant browser vendors (Google Chrome and Google-financed Mozilla plus Safari) to implement features, with a large part of browser APIs not implemented by FF and Safari due to fingerprinting concerns. [1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/2017/REC-html52-20171214/ https://www.w3.org/TR/2017/REC-html52-20171214/
- echelon 4y ago
  Alternate interpretation: w3c's XHTML was machine understandable. It took great care to introduce rigid and reusable semantics. You could spider the web and directly extract facts without ML or heuristics. It spiritually brought HTML closer to RSS and RDF, and there would have been a lot you could do with that. Google didn't want anything to do with that future. Search is their moat. They pushed a format that is easy for humans to author, tolerably messy, and knowledgeless for machines. If the format was difficult to extract knowledge from in a scalable and reusable way, Google could keep their search kingdom. XHTML was a ladder rung into the semantic web. A distributed knowledge graph that could be mined, remixed, and extended with little effort. It was marginally harder to author (the mimetype issue was ridiculous), but extending it was low hanging fruit. This isn't necessarily how it went down, but the incentives do align. I do think we'd have more automation in the world today if we'd have adopted XHTML. Now with AI/ML and NLP I think we'll get to this kind of web without a format to rigidly specify semantics. I still have to think that the ideas of semantic web and P2P could have delivered decades ago if Google and Facebook hadn't overwhelmingly pushed the envelope on centralized resources.
  - zozbot234 4y ago

zagrebian 4y ago

His bio says Protocol Labs.

thesausageking 4y ago
Protocol Labs is the corporate entity behind Filecoin: https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2020/10/15/filecoin-launch-finally-brings-200m-ico-to-fruition/ https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2020/10/15/filecoin-launch-...