Scott,
Yes, I'll forward that on in a bit, but is this a "who you need to know in order to participate" or is it an open forum?
I have to say I think this "open forum" idea would be so completely unwieldy as to completely bog down progress for ever. It takes some time and mental application to even "get" a web standards approach, let alone be able to say anything intelligent about how to propel it forwards.
What we have is a set of driving principles, which are evolving over time.
The way I see it, there are two strong drivers to standards.
1) The things web designers would like to be able to do in web pages, like positioning content, controlling type, or (looking to emerging standards) opacity, or new ways to create borders, or whatever else floats to the top of the general wishlist that designers express to each other and to the W3C.
2) Achieving these things in ways that promote accessibility, adaptability to various user agents, and whistle-clean HTML code.
The fact that there may be some quite limited group of people who actually decide how to implement these things does not worry me. I know that if they get it wrong there'll be hell to pay from people like me, so they have a strong incentive to get it right.
There's a difference, though, between giving them stick because they don't adhere to the principles outlined above, and criticizing them for recommending the deprecation of technologies that don't fit with the grand vision in driver 2.
If web design were a completely professional occupation like law or medicine, maybe we could elect our own standards body. But the present arrangement, with Sir Tim at the helm, the browser manufacturers represented and the creme de la creme of web thinkers getting involved by a process of recognition and sound contributions, seems to me to deliver a good result.
It's not too dissimilar to open source software. Proposals for improvements, peer discussion, and the best implementation wins.
-Hugh Todd
*****************************************************
The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/
See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm
for some hints on posting to the list & getting help
*****************************************************
