Congratulations to Marcos Caceres, Yehuda Katz, Alex Russell, and Anne van Kesteren on the news of their election to the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG).
This is great news: four out of the five reformers won.
Back-story: in late 2010, TBL invited me to join the TAG. I declined with thanks for two reasons:
- I was (at the time, especially) over-committed to standards (JS, mostly) and Mozilla work (e.g., setting up Mozilla Research).
- The TAG was not engaged “toothfully” (my word) on Web problems faced by developers, rather it seemed focused on XML and Semantic Web matters, and therefore I would be odd-TAG-member-out.
Having both (a) more time and (b, the point of this story) three or four kindred-spirit candidates would have changed my mind. I hope my decline-with-thanks message helped in some small way to bring about today’s good news.
Kudos to the reformers for running, to the W3C Advisory Committee representatives who voted in the reformers, and to the W3C and TBL for being open to reform.
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My hope is this will be finished:
https://www.w3.org/wiki/Evolution
@yuhong: yes, that does trail off as if someone failed to save an edit!
Evolution of the web under “coopetition” in standards bodies and more competitive innovation (possibly with patent assertions, etc.) is a fascinating and under-studied area. I too hope that doc gets finished, and I offer to help review it if anyone wants my review.
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It’s actually not at all clear to me what these “reformers” really want to achieve. If you think ES is bad, send a mail to es-dicuss. If you think WebIDL suckes, send a mail to public-script-coord. If you want TimBL to learn and care more about Web developer stuff, send him a personally mail. If you want the W3C Team to contribute more human resources to Web developer stuff, send Jeff Jaffe a mail (though I might be nice if there is a public channel for this).
There is a werid notion that W3C is slow because it’s working on Semantic Web or XML, but I don’t think TC39 is anyway faster and I belive the right way is so say loudly “You Web developers should not only ‘use’ the standards, you should also ‘drive’ the standards forward because you are getting money out of it.”
Seriouly speaking, I think the ratio of Web developers in a Semantic Web-related group is higher than, say, es-discuss, bacause, well, scraping an RDFa document is more like a thing a Web developer would do than sending a patch to SpiderMonkey, and so criticizing these communities saying that they don’t represent Web developers is just not making sense.
Kenny: you may be right about web devs outnumbering semantic web devs in w3.org, but that makes the case. If the w3 TAG is to be relevant, it has to match that ratio. It did not, prior to this vote.
Sure, anyone can participate. And if the TAG is mostly not effective, then web devs shouldn’t complain that they’re held back (and they don’t). But how much better could we do with a web-oriented TAG? Also, if the TAG becomes an escalation path, we need balance.
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