PUBLIC MARKS with tag standards

You can call this nitpicking, but this stuff matters! This is supposed to be a canonical representation of human relationships. But it only takes five minutes of reading the existing standards to see that they're completely inadequate.

Observing this gives me all the more sympathy for bodies like the W3C et al who kill themselves trying to define standards for things that to many people are still profoundly arcane abstractions (but as we see, are very real, very affective.)

The internet and the web were created so that people could connect; that those who were separated physically could still work together. The roots of the web are based in openness and cooperation, not unilateral decisions that demonstrate little tolerance and no empathy. I'd rather use an imperfect technology created by a team of varied and interested people, then a "perfect" work created in isolation and dumped on the world in some grand "Ta Da!" moment. An imperfect technology can be perfected, but you can't fix hubris.

Again, it’s great for them, but what about for the next lot

This article explores ways that are available to compromise that incompatibility and to make open standards work for open source.

I’m saying that the iPad is the new IE6 because we are expecting it to be something that it isn’t, the same way that we were expecting that IE6 would have the same features/performance/reliability than the latest versions of Firefox/Safari. It takes years and many iterations to a technology become “stable”, early adoption of standards and poor implementation leads to headaches. It happened with IE6 and it is happening with the iOS Safari right now.

I’m saying that the iPad is the new IE6 because we are expecting it to be something that it isn’t, the same way that we were expecting that IE6 would have the same features/performance/reliability than the latest versions of Firefox/Safari. It takes years and many iterations to a technology become “stable”, early adoption of standards and poor implementation leads to headaches. It happened with IE6 and it is happening with the iOS Safari right now.

Worldspace FireEyes is an unprecedented, nextgen web accessibility tool that ensures both static and dynamic content within a web portfolio are compliant with standards such as Section 508, WCAG 1.0, and WCAG 2.0.

Facebook is retro because, like AOL, it's retro by its nature. It's a closed system.

What’s to stop another company from doing to Facebook what Facebook did to MySpace? More to my point, what’s to stop some new owned-by-nobody technology or collection of protocols and free code from doing to Facebook what SMTP, POP3 and IMAP (the protocols of free and open email) did to MCI Mail, Compuserve mail, AOL mail, and the rest of the closed mail systems that competed with each other as commercial offerings? Not much, frankly.

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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It is far far easier to snipe from the sidelines than it is to put in the effort to attend telcons and face-to-face meetings, to engage on mailing lists, to write specifications and implementations and tutorials.