As you said many times before, the W3C WGs should be more open to authors. A transparent web is the only way the web can move forward towards interoperability.

No doubt that HTML 5 is moving fast as a spec, particularly in comparison to the dearth of new stuff over the last 8 years or so. The reality for web authors, though, is that even when the spec work wraps up, it’s still gonna be half a decade until we can use HTML 5. The bits that are pervasive (some variant of local storage, etc.) are already getting wrapped up by JavaScript libraries, which gives us new stuff on an accelerated timeframe, but that approach doesn’t really have the power to tackle things like tags.

That’s the biggest component of the “slowness” I was referencing.

Regards

In any case, tips on how to make it move faster? I’d like for that to happen if possible.

There’s a symbiosis between innovation and standards. You’re pushing innovation, and saying that standards will come along, someday, maybe. If all we do is innovate, all we have is chaos.

To be honest, I don’t see what either you or Paul want differently, other than you want the W3C to “do more”. What innovation should we be pursuing?

Ah never mind. I’m an outsider, what do I know.

I think you hit the nail on the head when you say “there’s no mechanism in place by which any browser vendor can take significant risks without incurring the wrath of a swarm of WaSPs”. Conceptually, why couldn’t Silverlight become a standard or at least considered? (not that I’m arguing for or against that happening) There are two different implementations of it Silverlight which is one of the W3Cs requirements.

I’m not pessimistic about the W3C, I’m indifferent to it. I’m not a member, I pay no dues, and while it ratified some good specs back in The Day, it just hasn’t done much to keep its legitimacy or build its brand this century. Were I at the helm of such an organization, I’d be deeply worried that it has fallen prey to a the problem that Hamming reported of Shannon:

When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems.

I’ve loved a lot of “dead” technologies: capabilities for security applications, functional programming languages, non-relational databases, javascript – , lord knows I’ve worked on my share of things that took much longer than planned…so I’m completely willing to accept the premise that I’ll be terribly wrong some day about the importance of the things that I linked to, and in specific the “Semantic Web”.

It’s no stretch, however, to suggest that what the web has needed most, and for a long time, is for our existing markup language (HTML) to evolve some much less academically interesting semantics to better handle the applications being demanded of it. That work is now (slowly) under way via HTML 5, but it seems to have taken some doing to talk the W3C’s membership and participants down from the Semantic Web and XML ledge. That HTML 5 even clings to an XML serialization at all as a goal is pretty laughable given the glaring design flaws and adoption failure of XML as a format. What I worry most about is that it’s indicative of how jaundiced the “main line” W3C participant perspective has become with regards to the real-world application of W3C specs.

Real-world application is what buys the organization legitimacy, and my point wasn’t that those specs were “failures” in solving their specific problems, it was that the W3C can’t drive their adoption much beyond the already appreciated need in the market for any given standard. The Semantic Web might yet succeed (I’m a pessimist), but the W3C surely failed to drive its adoption by its own might. No one should have expected differently then or now, as Ian points out. Least of all the W3C membership and staff.

Jon Ferraiolo said to me once:

A good spec is one that everyone implements.

The W3C’s failure here isn’t that it took on Semantic Web, it’s that it did so when there was no clear, broad, deep constituency for it, no existing set of vendors jockeying to have their specs ratified, and no discernible relationship to how the real, actual web is evolving. It’s a great-big organizational fail.

Regards

Consider the recent CSS features added by WebKit: transformations, animations, gradients, masks, et cetera. They’ve very nearly _run out_ of standards to implement, so they’re starting to implement the wouldn’t-it-be-cool-if stuff. If I’m not mistaken, this is the exact sort of thing you’re wishing for.

One of the things I find interesting–and even amusing–is that (IMHO) Webkit is doing these things not because “they’ve nearly run out of cool things to implement”; I think they are doing this as part of the Mobile Me push, and as part of the iPhone browser/app push. The irony (and probably it’s a good thing, not a bad one) is that this is exactly the reason why XMLHTTP evolved–IIRC, it was created at the request of the Outlook Web team (i.e. Microsoft) to help them make Outlook Web a more seamless experience.

Where would we be today if they hadn’t done that?

“I find that stance odd: it’s ok for the minority market share browser to innovate, but not the browser that we REALLY NEED improvement in? I mean, sure, they need to get their CSS 2.1 story in order, but if they added all of Safari’s CSS extensions or implemented hbox and vbox, would that not cover a multitude of sins?”

They are free to innovate as they wish. But until they’re caught up with the other three browsers, I’ll wonder aloud why implementing, say, hbox/vbox was more important to them than implementing DOM L2 Events, the remainder of CSS 2.1, or *anything else that we would be able to use TODAY were it not for IE*.

Your rubric is clearly different from mine. But don’t misunderstand: I find it most critical for IE to implement stuff that will make my life easier *tomorrow*, regardless of whether it’s a standard or not. For instance: I think IE should support the CANVAS element, even though HTML5 is not yet final. I’d want them to support it even in the absence of any standard simply because they’re the only browser left that *hasn’t*.

You may be right that WaSP needs to restate their focus. They mean “standards-compliant” as an alternative to the browser wars (proprietary features and APIs designed to stay proprietary), rather than as an alternative to innovation within a web standards framework (features that act as proposals for new standards). That’s my interpretation, at least.

Look, for instance, at SPARQL. This was not some kind of waterfall model – they waited until there was some kind of agreement, took two years and just nailed the spec down, providing comprehensive test cases, involving the community. Obviously, the process used for SPARQL will not fit all W3C activities – HTML and CSS, and other standards directly relevant to widely-implemented browser technology will take longer and necessitate a lot more pain.

I think that the W3C is learning very quickly that they need to change and that the nature of the Web as a decentralised system is going to change what it means to be a standards body. Two of the four browser rendering engines are open source, after all. Overall, there are a great many reasons to be optimistic about the W3C.