W3C and what not

By ian

There has been a recent surge of commentaries on the W3C over the past few weeks. Jeffrey Zeldman, Jeff Croft and Molly have all weighed in on this and have sparked a flurry of commentary. Here’s a one sentence summary of each post:

• Molly: For god sakes, will the damn W3C and/or WaSP do something?
• Jeff Croft: Why the hell aren’t there any web designers or developers on the committee that sets the standards for web design and development?
• The Z-Man*: While the W3C and WaSP are messed up, it’s not like things have stopped working.

*This has not been endorsed by Mr. Zeldman, but I felt that putting the name Jeff twice looked odd and I couldn’t come up with a more relevant nickname.

In general, all posts are complaints about the current state of the standards bodies.  For the most part I agree. The W3C is a big slow moving behemoth that doesn’t seem entirely connected to the web community.  Which actually kind of makes sense, because the world’s most common browser is made by a big slow moving behemoth that doesn’t seem entirely connected to the web community.  This creates a never ending circle of slowness.

Browsers haven’t fully implemented the decade old CSS2 standards, so I doubt that there is a big drive at the W3C to pump out a new CSS standard. In the same token, Microsoft didn’t see any change in the standards for years so they allowed IE6 to destroy the souls of web designers for a while. This is where bodies like WaSP can help. Their goal is to rectify problems like this, but unfortunately they are just as slow and awkward as the browser companies and the W3C.

With that in mind, I would put the thumbscrews to WaSP.  I offered to join at last year’s SXSW and received a few emails, but it seemed rather unorganized and chaotic. I also signed up for the Street Team, but never really saw anything happen. Here are a few ideas to help move WaSP forward:

• It’s time to graduate from mailing lists and IRC. There are plenty of free forum and wiki tools out there that require a minimal amount of maintenance.  A mailing list is great for announcements, but not so good for real communication.
• Be more open about the membership process and requirements. There are lots of people willing to help that just don’t know how to get involved.
• Setup local chapters. This could help get more people involved. These chapters don’t even need to really work together on the same thing as much as working towards the same goal. BarCamp has been hugely successful with no central leadership whatsoever.

In general, I would agree that the current system is broken, but I think that it’s mostly because as designers and developers we feel helpless.  Many people would be amazed at what could happen if the whole process was a bit more open and decentralized.