Is the W3C Becoming Irrelevant?. Dare Obasanjo (Microsoft) feels that the W3C process is too bureaucratic and takes too long.

For a long time I used to think the W3C held the future of the World Wide Web in its hands. However I have come to realize that although this may have been true in the past the W3C has become too much of a slow moving bureaucratic machine to attract the kind of innovation that will create the next generation of the World Wide Web.

The objective of the W3C is to provide and support a process by which interested parties can work together to standardize web technologies. The W3C is a facilitator for the process, helping the parties involved to reach an agreement on the standard. If the process is a hard and long one, that is as much a fault of the parties involved (Microsoft, Apple, IBM, etc, etc) then it is of the W3C process.

Obasanjo's post makes it sound like the companies would have long ago settled on standards, expect the pesky W3C keeps getting in the way. I don't believe that is at all what the issue is here.

Consider for a moment only the need for innovation in HTML. One of the reasons why XHTML was developed was to provide interested parties with the ability to extend HTML without having to go through a big standardization process. That's what the 'X' stands for: extensible. The difference was that the extensions could be made in a standard way that could be leveraged by new application while not breaking existing applications.

Apple has decided to forgo this route and instead come up with their own HTML tags. They don't want to go the XHTML route because apparantly XHTML hasn't been reliably implemented by the modern browsers. Although that may be true, that is the fault of the browser manufacturers.

In other words, these companies participated in and agreed to the development of a standard (XHTML) that would normalize the mess that was HTML and provide them with the means to innovate and extend HTML in standard way. These companies have not yet bothered to implement support for this standard in their browsers. As a result, they are not able to use it to innovate as they see fit.

The result: they blame the W3C for being too cumbersome, then go back to creating their own HTML tags.

The events of the past few weeks has shown that while many of the companies involved (Microsoft, Apple, etc) pay lip service to standards, they do not believe in them. They do not see the value in putting in the effort and doing the hard work required to make the standards work.

It is clear that both Apple and Microsoft have adopted the same strategy: to create browsers that are extended in ways that tie them their OS and other products. While these browsers will support some common set of HTML tags, it is not clear exactly what this set is. It sure isn't XHTML or HTML 4.0x, but some combination of the two. Web developers can now look forward to having to discover and code to this evolving, changing, de-facto standard.

I guess the industry is not as far along as I thought we were.