There is some turbulence in the web standards group, and a lot of designers and developers I respect and admire are part of it. Molly Holzschlag’s call to fix problems with the future of markup and Javascript got a lot of the community members together. She has also followed up it with the explicit issues, addressing the working group.
There also seems to be discord among the members and contributors of the working group. Jeff Croft brings up the point that none of the W3C team members are working developers. Does this mean that there is a communication gap between the specification makers and the followers?
There seems to be resentment over the slow pace of progress. Jeffrey Zeldman has replied with why the slow pace is good. Clearly there seems to be either miscommunication or a difference in the perception. Or as Aristotle Pagaltzis says that some of us have got too used to the chaos and confusion to actually see it.
I am not a key member of any of the working groups, but I am a developer, member of the mailing lists and forums, and I care about the standards. I have also contributed to the feeling that W3C is moving too slow, especially about the future of markup. And as Jeff Croft has raised the point, with the other solutions like the runtimes are going at good pace, the markup can get hurt. Overall I think there is either a lack of communication from the working groups to the community, or there is a huge difference in the perception which is creating uncertainty about the future. Whatever it is, the office and the field need to keep each other updated and involved.
Hopefully this to-and-fro will bring out good. Meanwhile, as a keen standards supporter I will follow and contribute whenever I can.
August 20th, 2007 at 3:49 pm
[...] Read more at iface thoughts Bookmark to: [...]
August 24th, 2007 at 5:52 pm
[...] Nobody can deny that innovation might distance us a bit from standards. But if this difference really helps then the standards groups have to expand to incorporate it. We have seen that if a technology helps, it gets used on the field, and ends up in the competing team if it is not acknowledged by the standards group. In fact, a speedy evolution of these technologies can make the standards group drag itself. Maybe W3C has been doing things as it was earlier, but the technologies outside are evolving much faster, making them appear slower. [...]
August 28th, 2007 at 4:21 am
I think it’s a little disturbing that the members of W3C are supposed to be in charge of the way things are done on the internet, yet none of them are developers. Sure they may have an idea about what changes need to be made, but they aren’t in the position to be physically implementing it or maybe there are things that they’re missing because they aren’t commonly practicing the trade.
December 21st, 2007 at 12:33 am
[...] has been there earlier. But this time the developer community is asking for a reorganization, not incremental [...]