Re: David Baron: The W3C Member Companies Conspire to Kill the Web

Gerald Bauer wrote:
>    David Baron has written up a blog story titled "The
> W3C" arguing that the W3C member companies have no
> interest in a free and open web for all and instead
> prefer W3C standards that push closed, controlled,
> environments (where interoperability doesn't matter)
> and where the W3C member companies can charge money
> for the client offering.

Yes, his reasoning is that a world controlled by three browser vendors, 
two of which are closed and controlled is much better.

Follow the money. Some companies have a strong interest in keeping the 
Web in the tag soup mess that it is today. Microsoft, because it means 
that IE stays. Opera, because its business is in selling IE emulators 
and proxies for mobile devices. And now the Mozilla Foundation is being 
financed by Nokia to compete with Opera in the 
tagsoup-rendering-for-mobile space.

I'm not saying there's no good faith from at least some of those people. 
Simply, some people have much higher financial interest in incremental 
hacks on the status quo, and those people aren't the content producers.

>      David writes:
> 
>   SVG and XForms weren't even designed for the Web.
> SVG was designed by graphic designers who wish the
> fact that Web pages aren't printed on paper would go
> away and by mobile phone businesses who want vector
> graphics for sending non-Web content to their mobile
> phones. Never mind that it ignores one of the key
> architectural principles of the Web.  The main
 > arguments for XForms always seem to relate to
 > "intranet" forms (where companies can earn money), not
 > Web forms (where they can't earn nearly as much, since
 > they can't charge for clients).

That's called trolling FUD. There isn't even the beginning of a fact in 
there. Until David can make an articulate argument, it's a waste of time 
discussing this. Someone that does their homework as opposed to pointing 
random fingers when they run out of Prozac might have noticed for 
instance that SVG Print is the least advanced of all SVG specs and at 
least come up with different gibberish, if not something sensical.

-- 
Robin Berjon

Received on Wednesday, 7 July 2004 06:25:05 UTC