| The W3C is broken: it has spent the last 10 years standardizing ideas instead of existing practice. This is totally backwards and leads to standards that are too complicated, unrealistic, and in many cases not needed at all. The general view of the W3C as a standards body is broken. The W3C gets companies and individuals together to hash out ideas for the Web. After some time and trial and error they assemble a recommendation. Hopefully people (i.e. the members of the W3C) put this into practice to see how well it flies in real-life. At some point, if the recommendation proves its worth, a standards body such as ISO or ANSI may want to formalize it. Or so it was. Once upon a time yo could find on the W3C site a statement to the effect that they were not a standards body. However, some people who wanted to see the ideas from the W3C gain more traction (i.e. XHTML) started referring to W3C docs as standards, and the W3C as a standards body. Jeffrey Zeldman, in Designing with Web Standards [sic], says the use of the word "standards" when referring to these specs was, in fact, "a guerilla marketing maneuver." This is not mere semantics. There is great value in making a distinction between well-considered ideas that still need to be battle-proven, and proper formal specs that have been sufficiently vetted. Eventually the W3C began to believe the hype and now presents itself as a standards body, to the detriment of the greater Web community because, as you point out, they are "standardizing" things that people aren't actually doing. |