4 ms·

So, to paraphrase, you think there will be no harm because the W3C isn't doing anything useful as things stand?

• talmand 13y ago
  Doing nothing useful doesn't necessarily result in harm. I keep pointing out that people are claiming that this is harmful in some personal way. I keep asking how. The best I've seen is that it creates harm to the standards, which is more about causing harm to the people who control the standards. This decision directly harms the standards body itself, it does not harm the open web. Corrupting the standards with bad decisions hurts the reputation of the standards body, which will eventually importance in the scheme of things. The open web will just move on to something else. The reason I say that is because if the web is truly open, it is free to ignore the "standards" it doesn't like. Meaning, the people who use it can choose to not participate. It's a standard because everyone agrees to use it together. If the people using the open web decide they don't like a browser that implements DRM they don't agree with, then they have the option to choose a browser that doesn't implement the DRM. If there isn't such a browser, the open web allows someone to create and share it with the masses. If this decision actually causes harm to the open web, then it's not truly open because that implies no one can get around the decisions made by this select group of people. If that's the case, then the web doesn't sound very open as it stands today.