[TriLUG] [OT] W3C and the Promotion of Fee-based Standards for the Web

[Donald Ball]

On Tue, 2 Oct 2001, rpjday wrote:

>   the w3c has pretty clearly lost its credibility.  this is not
> something a simple apology will paper over.  "whoops, sorry, i guess
> we just didn't think this through enough" ain't gonna cut it.
> several people have already proposed that any power to dictate
> web standard be taken away from w3c, since it's clear they don't
> know how to handle it, and given to some other body, like the IETF.
> or FSF.  or EFF.  at this point, anyone but w3c.  for that group
> to claim that they really had no idea what the backlash would be
> from this is pretty inane.  one can fairly conclude that they're either
> corrupt or clueless.  in either case, they shouldn't be allowed to
> play with dangerous toys like world-wide standards.

problem with that is, how do you do it? the w3c more or less made a power
grab for control of the HTML specification by a dint of hard work,
self-promotion, name-glitter (tbl), and coercion (how they ever got m$oft
and netscrape to agree to even pay lip service to their proposals is
beyond me). and y'know, thank god they did, otherwise we'd be entirely at
the mercy of whatever browser maker is dominant at the time, instead of at
least being able to make them look a little bad in public when their
browsers don't conform to the specifications - specifications they helped
write.

now you and some other like-minded folks come along and say we're
unblessing the w3c, we're going to bless Foo instead for the HTML spec.
how are you going to confer legitimacy to the blessing? how do you coerce
the browser makers to agree to implement the Foo standards?

- donald