[edd_dumbill]

This is a somewhat ungrateful perspective, just after the Eolas patent case was thrown out.

Yes, the W3C process takes about half the lifespan of many HN readers. Yup, it's not ideal.

But it's the only game in town and it's been going on so long because it works. Because it successfully brought Microsoft into the fold and conversation at a time where, had they decided, they could have broken everything.

It's worth exercising a little perspective. Can you think of any endeavor that has so successfully united vendors to create something as broad and interoperable as the web, over such a relatively small period of history? The W3C has been fundamental to this.

- What has the W3C ever done for us?

-- Well, HTML.

- Oh yeah, they gave us that. Yeah. That's true.

-- And CSS you could view source and copy.

--- Yeah, you remember how scared we all were of Microsoft Blackbird?

- All right, I'll grant you that HTML and CSS are two things the W3C have done...

(you get the idea.)

[gkoberger]

W3C isn't the only game in town. There's the WHATWG because of W3C's shortcomings.

[lmm]

Seriously, what has the pre-WhatWG W3C done for us that wasn't in "HTML 3.2"? I can't think of anything better in html4 than before, and plenty of things that're worse. As for CSS, it's evolved so slowly and refused to implement such basic features that people now use preprocessors to generate it, defeating the point entirely. (Not to mention that the most W3C-ey version was 2.1, which has still never been implemented).

So what has the W3C actually done for us? XHTML?

[tomjen3]

Why are they the only game in town?

And html is arguably a bad document language. Look at all the different conflicting ways in which it is rendered. And don't even get me started on css....