Hi, I am a firm believer in standards and mostly just keep an eye on the list (very erratically) to see what is going on and find out about resources that I might have missed out on otherwise.
I actively support standards but am beginning to get annoyed at some of the latest standards coming out as they don't seem to meet the real life needs of the web development community (take XHTML 2.0 for instance). I don't want to boycott standards - that'd be dumb - but I would like to see web developers being able to provide more feedback regarding standards under development. The obvious consideration is to become a member of the W3C - but unfortunately membership is restricted to those individuals and companies who can afford to pay $57,000 per year in membership fees. That would be why there is only 400 member companies. I find most of the active supporters of standards tend to be smaller companies and individuals - especially those who are willing to share information with others. Does anyone else see anything wrong with this picture? I did write to the W3C via email but have not yet received a reply. Anyway, I guess my question is, is this list an appropriate place to discuss such issues and perhaps discuss ways that developers can have more of a say about what should be considered for standards? Just something that has been beginning to bug me more and more over the last few years... I follow standards, I take pains and efforts to use them, I tell other people to use them and share details of tools that will help make following standards easier... But do I get any say in what goes into those standards... Not really. Is it just me who feels this way? On a totally different topic (one that is definitely suitable to this list - well, I think so anyway): If you are not already using it, a useful tool/reference for people new to CSS is the devedge sidebar tabs (http://devedge.netscape.com/toolbox/sidebars/) and checky (http://checky.mozdev.org/) that are available for Mozilla/Netscape. (I use IE to work in because that is what a lot of our clients use, but I always have mozilla open for testing and also for quick access to the devedge sidebar - it very neatly bookmarks the W3C standards so you can find what you are after straight away). M. e: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ***************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ *****************************************************
