Why The Web Sucks (You Just Don't Know It)
Once upon a time, the World Wide Web was going to be this awesome democratizing "everyone publishes, everyone reads" medium--a giant international bulletin board. Sure, most people just posted pictures of their cat. The power law meant some Mahirs and dancing hamsters were more popular than others. But there was something really neat about this idea.
For a while I've wanted to rant about the way I think the W3C has killed the web, but I've been sitting on it for probably a year, because, to be honest, I know nothing about the W3C and the web standardization process (other than the fact that they didn't seem open to public comment in 1998—hence, six years later, browsers still lay tables out poorly). However, I just discovered that browser developers started publically griping about the W3C themselves back in June 2004. David Baron of Mozilla wrote: "[I] believe that the W3C is no longer the primary organization to which we should look for future standardization on the Web." Ian Hickson of Opera commented before a W3C workshop (he doesn't seem to have summed it up quite as well afterwards)
I'm very much at a loss as to what to expect from this workshop. On the one hand I really can't see us convincing everyone else that the solution is to continue down the HTML path. After all, it's not in the interests of most of the other attendees. Many of them are wanting to sell SVG, XForms, or XHTML products, and most of those who aren't are probably more concerned with developing a good theoretical solution than addressing the unfortunate pragmatic needs of today's authors.
