Quoted post unavailable.
IIRC strictly speaking the "pandemic" started when the disease became a global thing: https://time.com/5791661/who-coronavirus-pandemic-declaratio...
The Web as the ultimate tool of resilience for the world
11–20 of 55 posts
Re: The Web as the ultimate tool of resilience for the world
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
>What is the relationship between W3C and WHATWG these days? IIRC a few years ago W3C essentially handed over web standards to WHATWG, with the thinking being that it wasn't helpful to have 2 competing standards.
Since the web standards are owned by WHATWG, any idea what the purpose of W3C is nowadays?
XML and everything that's build on it
Re: The Web as the ultimate tool of resilience for the world
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
>What is the relationship between W3C and WHATWG these days? IIRC a few years ago W3C essentially handed over web standards to WHATWG, with the thinking being that it wasn't helpful to have 2 competing standards.
Since the web standards are owned by WHATWG, any idea what the purpose of W3C is nowadays?
I know they do standards work on top of web protocols these days. Those digital vaccination records were based on W3C’s Verifiable Credentials standard. (The US ones anyway; I’m not sure about those used elsewhere in the world.)
Re: The Web as the ultimate tool of resilience for the world
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
>What is the relationship between W3C and WHATWG these days? IIRC a few years ago W3C essentially handed over web standards to WHATWG, with the thinking being that it wasn't helpful to have 2 competing standards.
Since the web standards are owned by WHATWG, any idea what the purpose of W3C is nowadays?
CSS, XML, SVG are still W3C standards
Re: The Web as the ultimate tool of resilience for the world
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
>What is the relationship between W3C and WHATWG these days? IIRC a few years ago W3C essentially handed over web standards to WHATWG, with the thinking being that it wasn't helpful to have 2 competing standards.
Just HTML, not anything else.
Note however that HTTP is a IETF standard, Javascript is an ECMA standard, so of the core web components, CSS is the last they control.
Re: The Web as the ultimate tool of resilience for the world
#16The W3C has endangered long-term resilience on the Web by supporting misguided efforts like EME, which aim to add a requirement for de-facto proprietary "plugins" to the open Web platform. Why should they deserve our support?
The W3C has no control over whether browsers implement support for DRM, they just wrote a document that says if you do the API should look like this. It was going to happen regardless. The actual argument is that the W3C has absolutely zero teeth because they couldn’t stop EME even if they wanted to and therefore are irrelevant compared to WHATWG.
There's more to it. The EME API is useless without the undocumented proprietary plug-in side (called CDM in the spec). It has no technical purpose. It's only to "standards-wash" an entirely closed DRM by Google (and everyone else's proprietary DRMs).
The spec contains diagrams and descriptions that have been acknowledged by its authors to be factually incorrect. EME pretends to be an in-browser thing, rather than hardware+kernel "hard" DRM. The spec proponents stated that they'll never use the scheme in the spec, and the "hard" DRM is the key feature they're after.
There have been a lot of process shenanigans: e.g. during likely the biggest disagreement in the history of W3C, the chair of the HTML WG announced that there is a consensus in the group about EME, and it can proceed further. Then the EME part has been moved out of public HTML WG to a closed-doors group.
So it wasn't merely Google+Netflix saying "we'll do it anyway". It was a subversion and corruption of the W3C itself.
Re: The Web as the ultimate tool of resilience for the world
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just HTML, not anything else.
Note however that HTTP is a IETF standard, Javascript is an ECMA standard, so of the core web components, CSS is the last they control.
Depending on what you consider core: also SVG, WebRTC, ServiceWorkers, Aria, Web Payments, WOFF, Web Audio…
Re: The Web as the ultimate tool of resilience for the world
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just HTML, not anything else.
Note however that HTTP is a IETF standard, Javascript is an ECMA standard, so of the core web components, CSS is the last they control.
Right, but that’s not the only thing they do that’s used on the web. They also own and run XML, security specs like CSP and SRI, the WCAG accessibility guidelines, Web Payments, WebAuth, WebRTC, etc etc.
They also do non-web stuff that happens to use web standards, for example ePub3.
Re: The Web as the ultimate tool of resilience for the world
#19Quoted post unavailable.
Just trying to read the article I was rejected from 3 IP addresses by
their junk-yard dog "Wordfence". And I didn't like the overly upbeat
tone of it. So yes, the statement seems full of parochial
self-congratulation for those "in the club".
Please, the "ultimate tool of resilience" was mRNA and the extraordinary efforts of biologists. It was hospital staff who died working 18 hour days without PPE.
This narrative that "technology saved us" in the pandemic is cute, but also puff and bluster.
We're still dealing with the equal and opposite effect of web technologies in spreading anti-vac messages and conspiracy theory.
The winners were Google and Amazon. Not "the web".
The paragraph "A web for everyone" pays lip service to acknowledging that "an estimated 37 percent of the world’s population lacks web access". Yet effectively shrugging responsibility for stewardship onto Google, a for-profit company bent on eliminating privacy and dignity online, isn't a good look for W3C.
It hides another reality, the one in which the pandemic showed our normative reliance on Web technology is itself a form of irresilience.
Our world is precarious in the absence of other parallel and supporting technologies, of offline, radio, good public transport, functional (healthy not overcrowded) physical community spaces, reliable mail service, stable electricity supply and much more.
There's a reality in which some people with unequal access to digital technology suffered more than if other social measures had been taken. Those with older phones and computers, the wrong browser, not enough money for bandwidth and those in rural areas were all marginalised. Those who value privacy and don't wish to lay their lives at the feet of a few giant tech corporations.
The "Web saved us from the pandemic" story makes it easier and more acceptable to exclude marginal groups within our own society.
Re: The Web as the ultimate tool of resilience for the world
#20"A web for everyone" turned out to be a lie.
The web architecture made it trivial to manipulate information and cancel people. Nothing in the protocols deals with archiving or true redundancy. Nothing deals with DDoS or bypassing censorship. The architecture itself encourages centralization. Moreover, the protocols are currently being manipulated to encourage even more central control.
We're way past the point where expressing sentiments like "this is for everyone" is aspirational. Right now it's merely out of touch and tone-deaf.