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More info: “The problem is too important not to be fixed, so nobody’s panicking and everybody expects things to work out. But there is no actual solution
in sight. The problem in this case is not the work being done by the W3C, but with the W3C itself. The Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C), the main technical standards developer of the internet (HTML and CSS, the
code underlying the web, are two such W3C standards), will lose longtime university partner MIT as administrator and US host organization at the end of this year. The organization has other academic administrators: Keio University in Japan, China’s Beihang University and the
University of Southampton as the UK and Ireland host. But MIT has been closely associated with the W3C since its development and is the organization’s primary financial safety net. Many executives and members are advocating for a new organizational structure for the W3C as a US-based non-profit
funded by members and board members – a familiar structure for industry orgs. But there is no immediate solution and MIT won’t renew its host contract at the end of the year. The clock is ticking. This major organizational overhaul to the W3C is also happening at a time of unprecedented activity and change
for the internet. Will the web support crypto and Web3 industry proposals? How will the web support advertising? What should be the baseline web browser security standards?
And, to top it off, there’s a bottleneck of proposals that are stymied because the W3C director, Tim Berners-Lee, is not as active with the group and, frankly, doesn’t seem to support
the direction of many new W3C working groups.
The executive steering committee, which needs to sign off all updates, didn’t meet at all in 2020 and hasn’t been actively involved in working group proposals since then either,
according to sources. Members and advisory board reps pushed for an interim board that could approve changes if the steering committee is disengaged. But that proposal was rejected by the steering committee.” |