W3C wasted the entire 2000s creating a terrible set of specs known as WS-Deathstar. It was a perfect example of industry-led committee-designed garbage and I was one of thousands of developers who suffered trying to build software with that crap.
Most cloud services built their APIs on top of REST and JSON and now WS-* is basically irrelevant. Good riddance.
I still think their model gives corporate and state interests far too much of a voice, but this is certainly a positive move. As someone involved in non-profit governance I can state that the transparency and accountability requirements for that status are not magic, they can fail, but they are real and important protections that make it a lot easier to assess an organization’s trustworthiness.
Speaking as a happy Firefox (and NetSurf) user: there is one viable Web browser vendor today, Google. Last I checked Firefox depends upon Google for revenue, Microsoft uses the same engine, and only (a subset of) Apple users use Safari.
And almost nothing (commercial) runs properly on any other browser. Hell, Google even disallows logins from most open source browsers. Almost makes me pine for the Microsoft days in the 1990s ;)
It’s safe (from Google’s perspective) for the W3C to adopt this new structure; because literally nothing can or will change about that status quo at the behest of the W3C. And if a disruptive force changed the landscape such that the W3C did have actual power, well then, Google would already have a well funded seat at the table.
There is simply no downside to Google from donating; and no downside to the W3C from accepting.
As one wit observed: if voting could change anything, it’d be outlawed ;)
The subset remark is a bit misleading - iOS devices make up the vast majority of Apple devices using the web, and whatever browser you pick it’s the Safari WebKit engine underneath. This gives WebKit a pretty sizeable amount of “high value” users.
Neat. Let’s see if they deprecate EME.
Now if only we could do this with the Chromium project…
W3C wasted the entire 2000s creating a terrible set of specs known as WS-Deathstar. It was a perfect example of industry-led committee-designed garbage and I was one of thousands of developers who suffered trying to build software with that crap.
Most cloud services built their APIs on top of REST and JSON and now WS-* is basically irrelevant. Good riddance.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/855282/what-is-meant-by-ws
I still think their model gives corporate and state interests far too much of a voice, but this is certainly a positive move. As someone involved in non-profit governance I can state that the transparency and accountability requirements for that status are not magic, they can fail, but they are real and important protections that make it a lot easier to assess an organization’s trustworthiness.
You mean they weren’t already that before? I don’t suppose they will refuse donations from browser vendors with conflicts of interest.
It doesn’t matter.
Speaking as a happy Firefox (and NetSurf) user: there is one viable Web browser vendor today, Google. Last I checked Firefox depends upon Google for revenue, Microsoft uses the same engine, and only (a subset of) Apple users use Safari.
And almost nothing (commercial) runs properly on any other browser. Hell, Google even disallows logins from most open source browsers. Almost makes me pine for the Microsoft days in the 1990s ;)
It’s safe (from Google’s perspective) for the W3C to adopt this new structure; because literally nothing can or will change about that status quo at the behest of the W3C. And if a disruptive force changed the landscape such that the W3C did have actual power, well then, Google would already have a well funded seat at the table.
There is simply no downside to Google from donating; and no downside to the W3C from accepting.
As one wit observed: if voting could change anything, it’d be outlawed ;)
The subset remark is a bit misleading - iOS devices make up the vast majority of Apple devices using the web, and whatever browser you pick it’s the Safari WebKit engine underneath. This gives WebKit a pretty sizeable amount of “high value” users.
Fair; but it’s still only 18.71% of the market at last report.