Re: From W3C's eCommerce Interest Group of the 1990s to Today's Web Payments Discussion

On Mon, 07 Apr 2014 16:18:31 +0200, Anders Rundgren  
<anders.rundgren.net@gmail.com> wrote:

> Compared to the "good old days", standardization has become much more  
> difficult since it is challenged by companies like Google who can do
> whatever they want.
> The tempo has also increased while automatic updates reduce the need for  
> "perfection".

This isn't entirely true. The "move fast and break stuff" model works well  
in some places, but it leads to lots of things being broken. Different  
ecosystems have different tolerances for the levels of breakage.

> Open source has turned out to be a strong alternative to real standards.

I don't see any sense in that statement. "Real standards" as I understand  
them are "things everyone uses". E.g. Microsoft Word, search engines,  
HTML, PDF.

Open Source is a way of making such things, but demonstrably not the only  
way (what proportion of the world uses an open source search engine or PDF  
viewer?). And it suffers the same manipulation as standardisation. When  
Google were the beast controlling checkins on Firefox it was no easier to  
change things in the real world (since although you could fork it,  
developers would follow the Google fork).

It's a strong alternative for the heavyweights to take control as much as  
anything else.

> Anders' law of standardization:
> Innovation is a fuzzy process.  Standardization is fuzzy but in another  
> way.
> Do not combine these activities unless everybody is prepared for a rocky  
> ride.

Standardisation should certainly follow (but not too far) behind  
innovation rather than trying to be the same process.

But changing the world is a rocky ride, and if you weren't prepared for  
that you're lost. (As in, not where you want to be - although you may not  
have realised :) ).

just my 2 kopecks

chaals

> Cheers,
> Anders
>
> On 2014-04-07 13:15, Joseph Potvin wrote:
>> Further to the wrap-up discussion about the creating on an Interest  
>> Group
>> http://www.w3.org/2013/10/payments/minutes/2014-03-25-wrapup/
>>
>> Does anyone on these lists have the "two-decades view" of W3C
>> involvement with this topic?
>> http://www.w3.org/ECommerce/
>> http://www.w3.org/TR/EC-related-activities
>> http://www.w3.org/ECommerce/Micropayments/
>> http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-jepi
>>
>> Three questions:
>>
>> 1. What happened to those original efforts towards a W3C Specification
>> on eCommerce that would have included specifications on web payments?
>>
>> 2. What should we learn from substance and fate of those earlier  
>> efforts?
>>
>> 3. Is there a need to "start" a new IG?  Or might the W3C eCommerce IG
>> just re-convene, update its charter, and carry on?
>>
>> Joseph Potvin
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 11:51 AM, Stephane Boyera <boyera@w3.org> wrote:
>>> Dear All,
>>>
>>> Thanks to the great help from the Web Payments Community Group and Manu
>>> Sporny, we just published a new cleaned version of the minutes of the
>>> workshop at
>>> http://www.w3.org/2013/10/payments/minutes/
>>> The agenda with links to slides and presentations is available at
>>> http://www.w3.org/2013/10/payments/agenda
>>>
>>> We are planning to circulate a draft report for your comments in the  
>>> next 10
>>> days.
>>>
>>> Best
>>> Stephane
>>> --
>>> Stephane Boyera        stephane@w3.org
>>> W3C                +33 (0) 6 73 84 87 27
>>> BP 93
>>> F-06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex,
>>> France
>>>
>>
>
>


-- 
Charles McCathie Nevile - Consultant (web standards) CTO Office, Yandex
       chaals@yandex-team.ru         Find more at http://yandex.com

Received on Tuesday, 8 April 2014 12:23:38 UTC