W3C is irrelevant these days.
The "Web" is what Google decides it to be - what new APIs to add to Chrome, what protocols to use (HTTP/2, HTTP/3) to access it.
The Web as the ultimate tool of resilience for the world
31–40 of 55 posts
Re: The Web as the ultimate tool of resilience for the world
#32W3C wew. Where do we even start? Let's begin with a polite thank you for your service, a hot drink, maybe some type of certificate of acknowledgment that says like "you were present." and then call it day. But beyond that, in my opinion, W3C has been a disaster since day 1. It seems like some people with good intentions decided one day they could just play RFC roulette and maybe if they slipped enough nonsense into t…
Main problem is that the web is amassing complexity everyday, without ever shedding any of it.
> Main problem is that the web is amassing complexity everyday, without ever shedding any of it.
Have you ever looked at your genome? It’s jammed full of old stuff tucked away in case it turns out to be useful someday.
Re: The Web as the ultimate tool of resilience for the world
#33W3C wew. Where do we even start? Let's begin with a polite thank you for your service, a hot drink, maybe some type of certificate of acknowledgment that says like "you were present." and then call it day. But beyond that, in my opinion, W3C has been a disaster since day 1. It seems like some people with good intentions decided one day they could just play RFC roulette and maybe if they slipped enough nonsense into t…
> the misshapen web they were imagining
Maybe if they had met us halfway and actually shown us the web they were imagining somewhere somehow it might have been easier to get on board, but whenever I tried to look at any of their standards, it was just endless detail with no explanation of why anybody would want to do any of this.
Re: The Web as the ultimate tool of resilience for the world
#34"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…
> bypassing censorship
Back in the early days, people used to say "the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it". That may have even been true back then. Definitely not true any more, at least not of the internet as we know it.
Re: The Web as the ultimate tool of resilience for the world
#35W3C is irrelevant these days. The "Web" is what Google decides it to be - what new APIs to add to Chrome, what protocols to use (HTTP/2, HTTP/3) to access it.
That's what they used to say about Microsoft.
Large players come and go. Chrome is at the head now because MS rested on their laurels and IE's performance rotted enough for a new player to take them on in market-share.
Re: The Web as the ultimate tool of resilience for the world
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 har…
"Standards-wash" is such an odd phrase.
If I need to build an HTML parser in a world with proprietary CDM, I sure as hell prefer that CDM to declare itself in a standardized way than to have my parser need to handle non-standardized content declarations. Having a standard benefits even user agents that don't plan to support the feature.
Re: The Web as the ultimate tool of resilience for the world
#37"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…
> bypassing censorship Back in the early days, people used to say "the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it". That may have even been true back then. Definitely not true any more, at least not of the internet as we know it.
It's still true, for the internet at least; the problem is that the other layers we've since built on top of the internet (large, centralized web services) do not share that virtue.
Re: The Web as the ultimate tool of resilience for the world
#38W3C is irrelevant these days. The "Web" is what Google decides it to be - what new APIs to add to Chrome, what protocols to use (HTTP/2, HTTP/3) to access it.
That's what they used to say about Microsoft. Large players come and go. Chrome is at the head now because MS rested on their laurels and IE's performance rotted enough for a new player to take them on in market-share.
I don't particularly see a new large player come in the browser space, though. Creating a browser from scratch is a huge untertaking and the fact that everyone except Google, Mozilla, and Apply have given up is testament to that.
Edge (Legacy) was a decent browser, but keeping up even with still missing Web APIs proved too expensive (alongside fixing bugs). Safari may be in the same pickle these days with apparently a sizeable backlog of missing features and incompatible implementations. Granted, that may also be due to many developers assuming Chrome to be a reference implementation.
If a new player comes along I'd guess it will be based on Blink, but they would probably need more resources than Google can throw at Chrome. And a way to finance them ... there's probably too few people willing to pay for a browser these days.
Re: The Web as the ultimate tool of resilience for the world
#39"As we reflect on the past two years of altered life amid the pandemic, the importance of the web and all it enables has been on high display. "
Including all the censorship enabled.
Re: The Web as the ultimate tool of resilience for the world
#40The 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?
> Why should they deserve our support? How are you supporting them?
They're not saying they support them, they're asking for reasons why they should.