[RyanMcGreal]

Irrelevant, if you consider their decision to promote XHTML2 while the rest of the world committed to HTML5 - incidentally, a development that puts to rest the fear that the web can't evolve and stay relevant without a single BDFL.

[olliesaunders]

They may be crappy but they are still the organization in charge of the development and standardization of web technologies, which he is arguing doesn’t exist. It does. It just isn’t as good as we’d like.

[RyanMcGreal]

My point is that the W3C is most successful as the agent that documents retro-specs of the broad consensus among browser makers and developers and calls it a standard. The community is more or less self-governing.