Current mood:	tired
Entry tags:	http://www.w3.org, w3c, web design

W3C critisism

I posted the following as a long comment on Assaf Arkin's blog. It was specifically in response to his blog post, but also more generally in response to the flack the W3C's been getting recently. While a lot of the critisism is justified, some people seem to be making more of it than it really deserves, and are pushing for more proprietary solutions and less reliance on W3C standards.

Since not all of the original comment is pertinent to the discussion, I edited it and adding to it as approriate. I have no idea who's going to come by my little rarely-posted-to and mundane blog to read about my (probably ill-informed) opinions, but I guess I'll find out.

I agree the W3C has made some enormous errors and needs to reform. They need to work with application developers, their own volunteers, the web standards people, the microformat people and most especially web designers. If they don't, they'll become an academic body whose badly implemented (or unimplemented) standards have about as much baring on the internet as those W3DC people. It would be a shame, because they've done some great work in the past, and until recently they had a spiffy shiny-happy reputation which everyone loved to love.

But let's look at some of those standards. W3C was small when it created HTML3 and 3.2, but it was already a growing power on the web when it came out with HTML4. It had to be, or it never would have been able to reign in the competing markup languages put out by MS and Netscape. HTML4 was a compromise to be sure, but it streamlined the language to the point where the language seemed to take on a coherent vision, providing the features web designers needed but removing the excess bloat. W3C's second major success was CSS, and after that came XML. Surely these are the W3C's most long lasting and enduring creations. I don't know how much of W3C's chemistry has changed since then, but certainly the W3C wasn't flying under the radar; I clearly remember they got a LOT of press, especially about XML, and just about all of it was good.

While each of the above standards *were* based on previous work, they were more than that. They were willing to push against prevailing implementations for the sake of elegance and power. They believed (and I believe) that standards should be elegant. Really there's no reason elegant standards can't work in the real world. Yes, implementations (both in documents and renderers) won't be perfect right off the bat. But draconian standards don't have to be adopted all at once. You can adopt them in pieces, but over time renders should be getting stricter and start to enforce standards more acutely. The desire for simple, predictable and strict implementation was, after all, part of the design process behind XML, arguably W3C's greatest success.

This can be at least partially a voluntary process- if browsers just provided purists with a prominently placed "strict" mode option optimized for and limited to rendering valid websites, a small percentage of users would turn it on. Web designers would be the first ones, testing their web sites in the stricter modes to keep from loosing the purist web surfers. It would also be of a lot of help if the W3C came up with degrees of compatibility (TBL has even advocated this). You don't have to look any farther than the Acid2 test to see how useful such a test could be, and how browser makes compete for the best results (although, unfortunately, the 2 most popular browsers still don't make the cut).

Whatever you think about mostly unimplemented standards like XForms, there's no sensible reason for sites as huge as Amazon.com to continue to serve such sloppy mal-formed HTML except for the fact that browser makers bend over backwards to allow them to do it. We would all be better off if websites served valid documents and browsers all rendered them correctly.

The alternative to gradually requiring strict conformance is to let browsers stagnate with almost-implemented standards indefinitely. Such an approach would result in a stack of web technologies full of workarounds and violations, with no hope of ever being fixed, and would greatly complicate any future implementations and even make certain future extensions impossible.

Disclaimer: I am not a professional web designer, and most of my experience w/ W3C standards has been as a spectator and casual user. Although I have been frustrated with uncooperative web layouts, most of my angst gas been toward poor browser implementations.