W3C takes flak

mewso

Standards guru Jeffrey Zeldman posted about the problems with the W3C. Makes interesting reading. Especially Bjoern Hoehrmann's rail against them.

democrates

musician wrote:

Standards guru Jeffrey Zeldman posted about the problems with the W3C. Makes interesting reading. Especially Bjoern Hoehrmann's rail against them.

Wow on a stick. This is a watershed post you've highlighted musician, well spotted. I've never seen the W3C under such a harsh spotlight, the unconditional love of the community is no longer a certainty and the king is clearly in his all-together.

Bjoerns post is as scathing as it is revealing, more than a few W3C mandarins must now be in various elevated emotional states. He presents the hard evidence of technical and social shortcomings, while Zeldman provides the summary blogbites.

The W3C community is much more than the W3C payroll. When they asked for public comment in the Patent Policy Review my submission suggested among other things that the exclusion of individuals from membership or even donations in favour of exclusively wealthy members was a strategic dysfunction leaving them beholden to rich patrons, and that they should open up membership, ideally by folding in under the ISOC umbrella.

My reading of the fact that they actually had that public consultation was that a faction were concerned the W3C was becoming too much a corporate puppet, and were sounding a clarion call for the wider community which they feared losing, hoping the FLOSS anti software patent masses would rise up and save the day. We did. But that was one battle and the war for greater corporate control has continued, to the detriment of the community. So now Bjoern and Zeldman have upped the ante, slapped the W3C face with their gloves, it's pistols at dawn!

What will W3C do now? Enough community ire could force a public consultation on the future of the W3C. But my bet is that the community will gain some improvements in their W3C interface: encouraging words, humble apologies, recognition, promises, and some consolatary measures.

I can see that most of the corporate members might fight a trench war to maintain as much of their advantage as possible. But they may be a divided camp too, it's always possible that some may feel it's more important to be seen as good community members than to maintain the exclusive membership advantage. Another strategic wrinkle is that if your competitor is gaining far more than you from exclusive membership, then you'd get a double-win from siding with the community and escalating this conflict. Even if you didn't scupper some competitor plans you'd have a hearts and minds win for your brand with the FLOSS community. Will be very interesting to see how the various stakeholders react.

mewso

I think as soon as developers take standards and accessability as seriously as designers like Zeldman then things might improve. I see far too many developers who could care less.