Forum Moderators: phranque
Please list reasons to support your decision for or against w3c. Here are mine:
I don't support W3C or their policies what so ever. It is also my understanding that less than 50% of webmasters agree with their technical specifications for controlling the web's infrastructure (though the percentage of members in THIS forum may not reflect that same number - we'll see). W3C has been around since 1994 and has a mere *350* members - an EXTREMELY small number given how many webmasters there are, technical organizations with a web presence, private investors available who would support their cause, etc. To me this says a lot about how people really feel about W3C. I also find it ironic that W3C, who has declared themselves the authority of web coding, has one of the suckiest-looking sites on the Internet - I mean seriously, I've seen better work from 12 year olds with GeoCities pages. At least that's my opinion on the site.
But these are only minor issues. As open as the Interent is, I am totally against any organization - governmental or private - trying to control any aspect of it. I think that the real "standards" are set by the BROWSER MANUFACTURERS, not some third party organization. Microsoft is a great example of this, as there are many things now possible on the web thanks to advances in Internet Explorer that were not possible before. Whether you happen to "like" those new features or not is relative, my point is that because independent browser manufacturers went above and beyond the "standards" set by W3C the capabilities of the web grew.
I believe that if the web had been under the full control of W3C that it would not be as functional as it is today. I also believe that if "everyone" - including browser manufacturers (specifically Microsoft) - were in compliance with W3C's standards, growth and continued development of the web would either cease to exist or an alternative would emerge.
It has been said by some that if every site were W3C compliant, the web would be changed "for the better" - while the geeks who think that having "pretty" code is more important than the final product will agree with that mindset, I think the rest of us are smart enough to realize that any organizational body that restricts/controls the freedom to innovate or go above and beyond the "standard" is an organization that should be SHUT DOWN, not supported.
How would you feel if you were told you couldn't supe up your car or build an additional room on to your house because "standards" prevented you deviating from the original specs? As an individual living in a free country I oppose any organization that infringes on my right to innovate or take what's given to me and expand upon it - W3C does this, and that's why I'm against their standards and everything they represent.
Some will say the web wouldn't be what it is today without W3C, and sure maybe I'll give you that - but their positive influence ended a long time ago. Today, WE - the webmasters and browser developers of the world - decide what direction to take the web from here, NOT W3C.
What, are you Marley's ghost now?
http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Longer.htmlin his posts I thought I might get litree and raise the tone again ..: )
The HTTP/1.0 protocol spec is set out in RFC1945, and HTTP/1.1 in RFC2616. HTML was first standardised as "HTML2.0" in RFC1866 in 1995.
In 1996 HTML development work moved from the IETF to the newly-formed W3C with HTML 3.2, followed by the HTML4 spec in 1997, and XHTML1 in 2000.
IOW the basic markup available to authors today hasn't changed since 1997. Is the w3c stymieing innovation on the Web by focusing solely on developing technologies for the Semantic Web? Since TBL suggests the Semantic Web, as currently imagined, is perhaps 10 years away, does this mean the current Web won't (officially) have any new functionality at all for the next decade?!
Don't forget that the internet consists of email, usenet, FTP, telnet, gopher, IRC, IM, streaming audio, VPN, and a whole host of other "non-web" stuff.
imho additional elements like <caption for="">, <header>, <footer>, <price>, <abstract>, <navbar>, <crumbs> etc would be useful, though perhaps standardised class/id names would be a better solution for some of these.
But for me it's forms that offer significant room for improvement. Xforms is hideously complicated, and with browser makers deciding to ignore it, the requirement for an xforms player makes the move to xforms problematic for public-facing sites.
XUL and XAML suggest there is an identified user requirement for richer forms. Ian Hixie's Web Forms 2 [hixie.ch] offers some ideas for richer, backwards compatible forms.
*And* since Moz and Opera could implement them for competitive advantage, these new, cool *visible* features (unsupported by IE6) could provide the impetus for non-techie users to switch to a non-IE browser. Double win!
One thing that struck me re the % of IE versus Mozilla users is a simple fact that I haven't seen mentioned, but that I started seeing when I added a bad bot php script to a few sites, suddenly those mysterious mozillas that were always inadequately documented re version numbers vanished instantly, dropping my mozilla numbers radically. Since Opera is lucky to get 1%, except on forums like this, all mac is 3%, I find it hard to believe that Mozilla/netscape has jumped up to 16% of the market, except among tech users. My suspicion is that IE is 80% of ALL site traffic, not all standard user traffic.
I'm also suspecting that when reports are saying 80% IE, they are often not filtering out spiders either, whether bad ones or good ones. Unfortunately most browser stat sites never report the actual full break down, and often don't run these bad bot blockers since they can backfire and ban real users too easily.
