Lachlan Hunt wrote:
Hi,
Tim Berners-Lee announced the W3C's new plan for HTML and the Working
Groups this morning [1].
[...]
Anyway, does anyone else have any thoughts or speculation about this?
If it's grand re-think time, I'd like to see the Compound Document
Formats work (CDF, http://www.w3.org/2004/CDF/
etc ) sit a lot closer to the heart of the post-xhtml1 roadmap. W3C is
good at creating technologies, but relatively poor at integrating them.
The Open Document format work, which happens to live at OASIS rather
than W3C, also has a lot of scope overlap here. It would be a shame if
users suffered because some of this work is happening in one consortium,
and some in another. I happen to have recently got involved in that
work, after spending the last 9 years involved mostly in W3C efforts,
and the disconnect between the two scenes is very disheartening.
I hope W3C can show some leadership here by doing all the new
HTML-related work in full public view, regardless of the impact that
might have on its ability to recruit paying Members. Operating in public
view has worked well for other W3C Working Groups in recent years, and
since the rise of the Open Source movement, it really just doesn't make
sense to design such things in private any more. It simply isn't fair to
those browsers (and other apps) that are built by large, distributed,
volunteer communities rather than by employees. Consortium-based
standards processes (for a blend of reasons - financial, legal,
practical, and cultural...) are employment-centric. If you work for a
Member organisation, you can get on the inside track. If not, you're
almost always left on the outside. This has left a lot of people - many
1000s - feeling out-of-the-loop w.r.t. HTML and other standards that
they care passionately about, and have invested massively in
implementing, evangelising, and deploying. However responsive and
generous the W3C WGs are with their reporting, imho the only fair way to
engage the opensource community is to allow *everyone* to see the
detailed technical discussions of the groups.
The engineering tradeoffs will get worked out in time, for better or
worse. I'm more concerned about how these groups work, about visibility
and accountability (WhatWG as well; there's more to accountability than
having public mail archives, and WhatWG has much to learn from W3C).
It's time we saw the detailed future of HTML designed in full public
view again. There are thousands of people out here who will never
represent W3C Members, ... never be W3C Invited Experts, ... but who
have a huge amount to contribute and who deserve to see as much as the
inner circles see, in terms of mailing list archives, meeting minutes
etc. There's a massive amount of work to be done, and would-be
contributors shouldn't have to beg to help. In that regard, the
standards scene still has a lot to learn from opensource.
imho etc.,
Dan
--
http://danbri.org/
> [1] http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/166
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