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W3C re-launched as a public-interest non-profit organization
- neilv 4y agoThis could turn out to be a very positive development. The press release has more info: https://www.w3.org/2023/01/pressrelease-w3c-le-launched.html.en https://www.w3.org/2023/01/pressrelease-w3c-le-launched.html...
- shortformblog 4y agoFor those interested in this from a nonprofit perspective, I did an interview with W3C’s recently departed CEO, Jeff Jaffe, last year to discuss the organization’s thinking around this move: https://associationsnow.com/2022/08/world-wide-web-consortium-w3c-nonprofit-transition/ https://associationsnow.com/2022/08/world-wide-web-consortiu... (Jaffe left the organization in December: https://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/9776 https://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/9776)
- brickers 4y agoJeff… Jaffe?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- remram 4y agoNot every parent holds their child's best interest higher than a potential joke. Not every country has mechanisms to stop it...
- account42 4y agoHaving a funny name is only a problem when you're dealing with bullies. In other situtions, having a memorable name can be an advantage.
- remram 4y agoOnly if your school has any kids who would bully. Seems safe then /s
- account42 4y agoI prefer to not let assholes influence my choices. Besides, a different name would not stop the bullies from being bullies. Perhaps they would pick on someone else, but I don't see that as much better. Better to deal with the bullies directly rather than trying to work around them, even if that seems harder at first.
- remram 4y agoA very courageous stance when somebody else bears the consequences. Let's give some of the kids joke names, and if they have a bad time, blame society. Let's give them access to guns, too, 'murica. Gotta commit to what you wish is right and ignore the evidence.
- zoobab 4y agoThey were financed by corporations. They gave up freedom by voting for secret DRMs in "standards". A complete disgrace.
- ekianjo 4y agoPretty much like the FDA
- uni_rule 4y agoThe FDA is a executive agency under the US federal government. Also how does food have secret DRM?
- ekianjo 4y agoI was referring to the fact that most of its funding comes from the industry. And there's a revolving door for the FDA guys to work in the industry as well, which is the hallmark of utter corruption.
- ramesh31 4y agoThe other option was irrelevance. At least we have a seat at the table.
- mmastrac 4y agoThe other option was forcing browsers to have to make this part of the tech stack convoluted and painful for those using DRM, perhaps diminishing the appeal of using it -- not irrelevance. We had plugins in the early days of the web, and the W3C was entirely relevant at that time despite the dominance of flash.
- ramesh31 4y ago>The other option was forcing browsers How, exactly?
- 4y ago
- yreg 4y agoSo what was it before and what's the material difference now?
- shortformblog 4y agoIt was a “hosted” organization that was managed by a number of universities and research/educational bodies, which meant that it had to go through these organizations to make material decisions, such as hiring and investment. They did it this way because when the W3C was founded the goal was getting up and running quickly. But over time, this setup became complex. Now, with this restructuring, it can make its own decisions about who to hire, for example, and can also do its own fundraising.
- gsnedders 4y agoIt was an organisation with no legal existence, existing as an agreement between different host organisations (originally MIT & CERN, soon turning into MIT & INRIA, then later joined by Keio University and Beihang University, INRIA also getting replaced by ERCIM).
- rvz 4y agoSo can they now tell us who voted for the DRM changes and why Mozilla failed to resign with the EFF despite going with those changes? This announcement is a magnificent nothing.
- andrewmcwatters 4y agoToo bad WHATWG has hijacked the standards.
- dmitriid 4y agoIt's good that WHATWG hijacked the HTML standard and made it consistent among browsers etc. Too bad Chrome has now hijacked all of web-related standards.
- andrewmcwatters 4y agoWho do you think runs the WHATWG?
- dmitriid 4y ago"The WHATWG was founded by individuals from Apple Inc., the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software" Steering group is people from the 4 major companies. At least originally WHATWG was undeniably and undisputedly a good thing. Their work literally removed incompatibilities from the web by producing standards that specify how HTML should actually be rendered, for example. Now everything is subverted and co-opted by Google, of course.
- andrewmcwatters 4y ago> Their work literally removed incompatibilities from the web by producing standards that specify how HTML should actually be rendered, for example. No they didn't. There's no standard today that exists that describes the implementation level details of CSS 2.1. It's descriptive and you have to figure it out yourself. // 2.3 The CSS 2.1 processing model // This section up to but not including its subsections is non-normative. // This section presents one possible model of how user agents that // support CSS work. This is only a conceptual model; real implementations // may vary.
- dmitriid 4y ago
- orangepurple 4y agoI thought W3C became irrelevant with the advent of WHATWG. In any case, the de-facto standard is whatever Blink does, and there is really no way around that for the foreseeable future.
- KwanEsq 4y agoWHATWG only picked up the abandoned HTML torch when W3C went off into fantasy land with XHTML 2.0. W3C was still and always relevant for CSS.
- orangepurple 4y agoHow can W3C be relevant if Google develops the roadmap for Blink?
- WorldMaker 4y agoXHTML 2.0 had some good ideas, it wasn't all "fantasy land", and WHATWG still picked over the corpse of XHTML 2.0 and added some of them to HTML 5. XHTML 2.0 was never truly finished so we have no idea what the final product would have looked like if the browser implementors had actually contributed back into the process instead of going off in their own direction.
- mmastrac 4y agoWhat I'm learning from this thread today is that there's a lot of animosity to what WHATWG did when Hixie et al rebooted the standard (which at the time was effectively dying and unmaintained). Can anyone explain this politicking and bad blood? Are there some people upset this long after it all happened?
- gsnedders 4y agoThe very short tl;dr is there were a couple main contentions: * Continuing work on HTML at all, instead of furthering work on XHTML + XForms + etc. * Certain decisions, especially around accessibility & internationalisation, at a point where the editor (then Hixie) practically controlled the decision making.
- andrewmcwatters 4y agoThey could have done it as a WG in W3C, but they decided not to. They instead created a separate organization and cabal which today is controlled de facto by Google.
- gsnedders 4y agoThey couldn't: to form a W3C WG requires support of the staff and the W3C membership, and it was clear that there wasn't that support prior to the WHATWG's formation. I believe the original preference of those involved was to do it at the W3C. And indeed, Web Forms 2.0 was presented as a position paper by Opera and Mozilla at a W3C workshop in 2004, prior to the formation of the WHATWG, and voted down: https://www.w3.org/2004/04/webapps-cdf-ws/papers/opera.html https://www.w3.org/2004/04/webapps-cdf-ws/papers/opera.html
- echelon 4y agoThey killed momentum on XHTML, which included reusable modularization and components. Inclusion of semantic web / structured RDF graph data was an objective, and this all got pushed by the wayside. Strict, structured data could have posed a threat to Google by enabling other search engines to more easily build fact-based competitors and crawl the web of rich data. The decentralized nature of OWL/RDF would have pushed the web closer to P2P aggregation (think RSS, FOAF, pingback...) The web could have been less Facebook-y, less Google-y, more Napster, more GPT-3 if XHTML had won.
- btown 4y agoSo, going off some of the descriptions of how this impacts budgeting and hiring from [0], I feel like this is a bit of a double edged sword: - Under the new model, corporations will be able to more aggressively influence funding, and thus be better able to ensure their interests are represented by new staff members responsible for shaping debate on features. - But under W3C's old model, where budgets and hiring were subject to approval by university liasons, staff couldn't be hired with enough agility and bandwidth to prevent those corporations from being overly aggressive anyways. Perhaps with more non-corporate-aligned humans being able to wholly focus on standardization now, there will be more attention paid to community engagement. I suppose time will tell. When it comes to things like FLoC (now Topics) [1] the privacy implications of having an agile standards board are more important than ever, and may actually have significant impacts on people's physical safety. [0] https://associationsnow.com/2022/08/world-wide-web-consortium-w3c-nonprofit-transition/ https://associationsnow.com/2022/08/world-wide-web-consortiu... [1] https://blog.google/products/chrome/get-know-new-topics-api-privacy-sandbox/ https://blog.google/products/chrome/get-know-new-topics-api-...
- phpisthebest 4y agoThey have been a rubber stamp for Google for years now anyway so there is no functional difference. What ever Google wants, the W3C approves as "standard"
- afavour 4y agoThat's pretty transparently untrue. Plenty of examples of Mozilla and/or Apple refusing to give the go-ahead.
- btown 4y agoWhether or not this has been true historically, all three companies are under massively increased pressure in the current environment, and may not be sufficient checks on each other the way they have been in the past.
- gsnedders 4y ago
- debacle 4y agoIs the W3C legitimate? At this point most of their standards are behind the curve. It feels as though the big three are setting the standards, and others (including W3C) are just following along.
- not2b 4y agoThat's how standards organizations usually work. They can't dictate standards. They have more power when there are many participants, but when there are only a few players all they can do is formalize things big players (mainly Chrome) decided to add.
- debacle 4y agoThat's how fake standards organizations work. Industries with real standards bodies benefit from collaboration on standards before implementation.
- tannhaeuser 4y ago> Our vision for the future is a web that is truly a force for good ... truly international ... more inclusive ... more respectful of its users ... supports truth better than falsehood, people more than profits, humanity rather than hate ... that works for everyone, because of everyone. Ok the question is how to achieve these goals and are those having failed to deliver on these goals for 28 years now according to their own words really the ones to expect solutions from, as W3C, Inc of all things. I'm sorry but all I can see is W3C, Inc. acting in their own interest, for job security. Because core web standards such as HTML are specified elsewhere (basically by random people on github, but mostly Google employees and other financially dependent people who're calling themselves the WHAT working group), leaving only CSS at W3C, and it's a fsking mess. Maybe we can get W3C to work on a formal CSS spec or, better even, a reference browser rather than la-la specs. Though I fail to see how that could be financed under either their old or new funding model.
- robin_reala 4y agoThey had a reference browser, but it looks like it’s been dormant for a decade: https://www.w3.org/Amaya/ https://www.w3.org/Amaya/
- ZiiS 4y agoAmaya specifically disagreed we should use "Browsers"; preferring that everyone could contribute by accessing the web via an "Editor". Calling it a browser shows how far it failed to achieve that.
- marcosdumay 4y agoNowadays, all the large browsers come with development tools that are much more powerful than Amaya (Firefox even has a developers edition that centers the UX around those tools). People still use them for debugging, not development, because the web is inherently a client-server environment that does not allow development done by the client. This is more of a "what were they thinking?" situation than we actually losing anything.
- Aissen 4y agoI'm guessing this means that the legal hurdles with the MIT are over ? https://mastodon.social/@robin/109524929231432913 https://mastodon.social/@robin/109524929231432913
- zoobab 4y agoAnd no need of HTML anymore, all the websites looks like <html><one.js><two.js><three.js>, nowadays.
- robertoandred 4y agoWhat do you think that JS generates?
- cognomano 4y agoDOM nodes, not HTML.
- robertoandred 4y agoA distinction without a difference.
- forgotmypw17 4y agoNot my websites they don't
- Spivak 4y agoNo no no silly. <html> ... <body> <div id="app"> </div> <script type="module" async src="/app.js"></script> </body> </html>
- account42 4y agoYou forgot the content thaat is actuall there in the <div> but hidden until the JS loads.
- college_physics 4y agoAs important as the Web still is (and with the re-decentralization of the fediverse [0] it may yet get granted a second chance), it has been clear for some time now that the shape of digital life is rapidly being defined by mobile devices where the web is a second class citizen. The original "web-phone" dream has failed [1] and there is a distinct lack of ambition about "open mobile". [0] https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/products/firefox-os/basic-features https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/products/firefox-os/basic-...
- danielEM 4y agoPaid seats kill the purpose. These standards are only for rich companies to preserve their business.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- asasidh 4y agoA truly decentralized web should not have any central bodies, non-profit or otherwise.
- jmbwell 4y agoHere's hoping W3C has a better chance today, with people increasingly aware that the web's commercial interests are largely counter to the interests of a free and open society, and with WHATWG dominated by those very commercial interests. Maybe W3C bungled things with XHMTL 10 years ago, trying to pull the web toward TBL's original vision of something like a giant Wikipedia. But things are very different now, having spent the interim in service to browser vendors and their monetization of control over user data. The mission is arguably much clearer now.
- account42 4y ago> with people increasingly aware that the web's commercial interests are largely counter to the interests of a free and open society Are people increasingly aware of that? Because society at large still seems to want to chanse after the latest shiny gadget without considering the full cost of the T&C.
- sylware 4y agoWell, it is supposed to be fine since the web core is still around which nearly all services provided over the net can be performed with, namely with noscript/basic (x)html. You can add <audio> and <video> and pass that to an external mediaplayer until the URL seeking interface is standard and keep web browsers as they are supposed to be: lean/light client. Basic (x)html forms can do wonders.