PUBLIC MARKS with search workshop

While preparing my HTML workshop, I’ve been re-reading W3C specs in far further detail than I ever would’ve imagined. The reading experience is far from delightful. Not only is the text the entire browser width in measure, but it’s dense and laborious to read. No wonder browser vendors have traditionally missed subtle details.

In February 2011 I got to visit Montana State University as a guest lecturer. I also spent a day doing a screen printing workshop for their graphic design students. The students got to print 4 different 2 color posters. It was a really fun experience.

preview of the Hand Made Tokyo document of the 3331 Arts CYD Tokyo mapping workshop we did last summer.

karl dubost said at 4:32 am on December 14th, 2010:

Matthew Gertner: “I’ll concede that I have more experience with W3C standards than with those of other organizations. ”

http://www.w3.org/Search/Mail/Public/search?keywords=Matthew+Gertner+

Matthew Gertner: “Someone at the W3C, the de facto master of all things web, decided that we needed a proper schema language for XML.”

Ah? It is usually not the way it is happening. Someone with experience of W3C knows that usually some companies being W3C members have interests in developing a market (because they need interop, because they need to sell products, because… etc.). These companies under the umbrella of W3C organize a Workshop where they gather position papers. After this Workshop, a report is written and published. If more interests, an activity proposal is drafted. This activity proposal is then sent to W3C Membership for reviews and comments. More comments, more modifications. Basically the goal is to establish if the Members have enough interests to commit resources for developing the work. WG charters are established along the same line.

XML at W3C has been pushed because companies had developed tools for handling it and thought that because invested a lot of efforts in the XML toolchain, let’s reuse pieces of it.

IMHO, the standards activities anywhere (including W3C) derail when Marketing dept/Product groups have too much impact on the specification itself. The standard is not anymore driven by the market needs, but the companies are creating the market. HTML5 starts to become known outside of the tech sphere and I think we will have surprises.

The top-down approach in a standard organization seems bit strange considering that the work is the result (usually) of a community of practice.

As for an individual or a small group is not “best” for creating technical specs, it is just easier and address the needs of this small group. So indeed it is easier to produce something which is consistent for this group, which goes faster to implement, to market, etc. That doesn’t mean the technology is better :) The bigger the committee the larger the number of issues. This is a truism. All communities are working like this.

Matthew Gertner: “I’d rather see companies get their tech out there and open it up afterward because it’s in their interest (which is usually is).”

Yes and it is what happens most of the time. That doesn’t mean it will necessary solve things. A good example has been SVG. Three “proprietary” specifications were published before the SVG work with people having things implemented in products. But the spec grew too big, with many people wanted to have their own feature, domain introduced in the specs. Standardizing means reducing diversity, and it’s sometimes take times. For SVG, Macromedia (which was bought far later by Adobe) was on the initial SVG WG… as lurkers and unfortunately not really active participants. This is another reality of standards organization.

There are many more issues. W3C (the organization) is doing a fair job at balancing the interests of everyone. There are frictions, nothing is perfect, but there has been always room for improvements. The process has always been flexible for welcoming new use cases.

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one day workshop on Open Bibliographic Data and the Public Domain. Details are as follows:

Where? Rooms 108/108a, FU Berlin, Garystr. 21, 14195 Berlin

When? 7th October 2010

Registration? http://publicdomain.eventbrite.com/

To meet the growing demand, the Web platform of the future will require smarter integration of non-PC devices with Web technology so that both hardware and software vendors can provide richer Web applications on various devices at lower costs.