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At 02:58 PM 4/22/2002 -0700, Don Park wrote:
> W3C is just an elitist organization in nature with a paternal bend.
> It knows what is best. Nothing is final until it had a say in it.
> It is dangerous for anyone else but it to meddle with the future of
> the web. It believes in good things like open access, but you can't
> have open access if you want the kind of productivity W3C have long
> demonstrated!
The W3C does not claim that it is the only group that can do anything
on the web. In fact, some of the core standards of the Web are
developed in other organizations - particularly HTTP [1] (an IETF
standard) and URI's [2] (also an IETF standard). These are pretty
central to the web.
Some of us spend an awful lot of our lives trying to do the right
thing for the world, and are trying to do this in an imperfect, human
organization organization called the W3C. It's a bit like trying to do
work in any imperfect organization. I'm committed enough to this that
the last two times I looked for a job, I limited myself to potential
employers who would fund my continuing efforts in the W3C. I expect I
could make a lot more money doing something else.
And frankly, no, we don't know what is best. Some activities succeed,
others fail. We have to try out different things based on our best
guesses. That's life. I do think that the W3C has had some pretty big
successes, including HTML and XML.
Jonathan
[1] see http://www-old.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/
[2] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt
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