- From: Robin Berjon <robin@w3.org>
- Date: Thu, 02 Jan 2014 13:58:16 +0100
- To: Brian Kardell <bkardell@gmail.com>, Michael Smith <mike@w3.org>
- CC: "www-tag@w3.org" <www-tag@w3.org>
On 31/12/2013 17:44 , Brian Kardell wrote: > My claims are less grandiose than a total indictment of absolute failure > and I want to make sure they are understood in the proper vein. As a > "whole" and despite theoretical goodness - the wider vision and approach > pursued by W3C during this period didn't work out. In addition to a > lot of it just not getting implementation/adoption/lasting acceptance, > it led to fracturing and frustration in a whole lot of ways - some of > the most critical commentaries come from former editors/chairs/etc - not > just regarding the core browser technologies, but especially there. > There has to be something we can learn from this. I certainly wish we would. Contrary to what is often said, people in the W3C community didn't turn their backs on browsers and HTML. It just so happened that after the first browser war, very little was going on in that space so that innovation had to happen elsewhere. IE did add a fair number of interesting features but they remained IE-only; meanwhile the others were largely busy (re)building the foundations of today's major browsers. When the browser space became competitive again, a lot of the intervening innovation was tossed out. If there's one thing that I think we should learn it's to go fish out the babies that were thrown out with the bathwater. Some of those were really useful, some solve rather hard problems that we still have today. -- Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon
Received on Thursday, 2 January 2014 12:58:26 UTC