My brief take: now is the time for W3C to move out of the industry consortium / browser wars mode of operation, and to catch up with the ways of working popularised by the opensource movement: most importantly - publically visible, bloggable, google-able archives for all technical discussion.
I completely agree. But (and I'll probably end up fanning the flames with this) there is another model which can also be looked at. Look at the progress Macromedia/Adobe have made with Flash and the Flash player since it was first released. Originally a simple shape tweening program, it is now a power house for animation, scripting, video and server communications. I'm not saying it doesn't have problems (accessibility etc), of course it does. Indeed I prefer working with html/css myself. However, the progress that Flash has made while html has been relatively static is staggering. And the reason for this has to be the lagging support for the standards that the W3C produce (Adobe of course have complete control over their player). So perhaps the W3C should throw their weight behind a browser to make it as compliant as possible - blow the dust of Amaya for example.
It's also interesting to note that, in part, the resurgence of standards based development can be attributed to the non-standard xmlhttprequest javascript object (thank you Microsoft - can't believe I said that - although the gears are now set in motion to make it a standard since everyone loves it so).
A few thoughts... Allan - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
