Bureaucracy at the W3C
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Thursday, Jul 2, 2009 / 3:45pm View more articles
The W3C is an international group that develops web standards. Some people accuse the group of being slow and inefficient. Since the W3C's director is the guy who invented the World Wide Web, it's hard to speak poorly of the organization... but I will.
Today's announcement is a perfect example of the how the W3C got their reputation of being slow to define standards.
The W3C announced today that the XHTML2 group will stop working at the end of this year. Starting next year, they'll put all the smart XHTML2 people on the HTML5 team. By doing this, the W3C hopes to "accelerate the progress of HTML 5".
That's great! Unless you're on the XHTML2 team.
Diving deeper into their FAQ, we see that the XHTML2 docs will stop development, only to be published as "Group Notes".
So these poor XHTML2 guys get to spend the next 6 month working on a project that has already been killed — basically just taking notes. What a waste of resources. Is the W3C filled with such bureaucracy that they can't amend the XHTML2 charter?
If they've already decided on killing the group, kill it now. Put the resources to work on a productive project that will actually see the light of day.
Web developers are already excited about HTML 5, but if this announcement represents how the W3C "accelerates", we've got a long wait.
Today's announcement is a perfect example of the how the W3C got their reputation of being slow to define standards.
The W3C announced today that the XHTML2 group will stop working at the end of this year. Starting next year, they'll put all the smart XHTML2 people on the HTML5 team. By doing this, the W3C hopes to "accelerate the progress of HTML 5".
That's great! Unless you're on the XHTML2 team.
Diving deeper into their FAQ, we see that the XHTML2 docs will stop development, only to be published as "Group Notes".
So these poor XHTML2 guys get to spend the next 6 month working on a project that has already been killed — basically just taking notes. What a waste of resources. Is the W3C filled with such bureaucracy that they can't amend the XHTML2 charter?
If they've already decided on killing the group, kill it now. Put the resources to work on a productive project that will actually see the light of day.
Web developers are already excited about HTML 5, but if this announcement represents how the W3C "accelerates", we've got a long wait.
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