Matthias: blog
Das Logfile über mein Leben im Netz.

The W3C is fucked, is it not? Donnerstag, 17. August 2006, 02:31:21

I admit it: I haven't checked with the W3C for a very long time. Life's like that. At one point you're a rabid standards zealot, and then a couple years later you find you don't give a rat's ass about Doctypes (well I still do, this is just rhetorics, OK?).

And then, out of the blue, I read this blog post about XHTML 2.0. It's not a particularly profound post, but it's about XHTML 2.0 (the development of which started when I was still interested in Web Standards), about the failure of publishing a final version, and about the browser manufacturer's failure to even support XHTML 1.0 and CSS.

This put the W3C back in my mind.

And then I read Don Parks blog posting about the W3C Woes:

Looks like W3C is still on it's downward spiral. I've had my own hits and bumps with W3C and it took me a long time to wash that W3C taste out of my mind. Looking back, I think what the world needs a more modern form of standardization process for technology related standards, one that supports incremental improvements and immediate deployment as well as ability to fix past mistakes.

If you follow the link (as I did) in the above paragraph, and read the referenced articles, you'll learn that the W3C is in deep trouble. The organisation is bloated, the standardisation process is too complicated, the Working Groups are suffering from nepotism and bullying, the smart guys are leaving in droves, in short:

The W3C is well and truly fucked.

What a wonderful chance to start over: Fire everybody. Throw out all the fatcat corporate droids. Turn the W3C into a band of guerilla standardizers that can hit us with an innovative, cutting-edge and working concept whenever we're turning our backs. Stuff like those funky new microformats, for example.

On second thought: Just fire everybody. Shut down the W3C. Donate the money to charity. And let the public (that's you and me) decide for itself which standards it wants to adopt.