[growthwtf]

What a weird piece of writing. Is this like just chicken scratch? Or is this seriously some kind of part of the W3C working process?

Section 2: Third party cookies have gotten bad. Ok.

Section 3: There are legitimate use cases that third party cookies currently cover. Also ok. Then they throw in, "Be aware that a set of new technologies which carry minimal risk individually, could be used in combination for tracking or profiling of web users." Yes? Huge scope increase in the document though and all of a sudden we're now talking about tons of tracking technologies in aggregate? The authors move on without further comment.

Section 4: I think the first half is essentially saying that new technology coming online in the web platform will make the third party cookie problem worse, so we should fix it soon. OK, I'm with back with you. Then the document suddenly pivots to proposing general standards for web privacy again, saying that the burden of proof is on the people originating the proposal to, before concluding by saying (apparently without irony?) that justifying the removal of third-party cookies' impact on business is outside of the scope of the document.

I'm missing a ton of cultural context here about how W3C works, so I'm guessing this probably amounts to rough notes that somebody intends to clean up later that I'm being overly critical of, and they didn't expect it to get any traction on hacker news.

[bilekas]

It's W3c... They've never been the most coherent with standards ironically.

[motorest]

...or it's a design by committee thing, and some people in the room are doing their best to preserve current and future tracking technology.

[bilekas]

It's exactly this, there is a group who come together and never agree on rules, but when they do, they never enforce them. It's I believe the definition of a paper tiger, sadly. A great idea executed horribly.

[__alexs]

Standards bodies rarely enforce rules themselves.

[squigz]

Is it really on the W3C to enforce standards? How would that even work?

[chasd00]

if they had a clear test that declares a site w3c compliant or not with no wiggle room then they could work with something like the ADA or other accessibility related standards and make w3c compliance required for ADA compliance.

[lukan]

By shipping their own reference browser ..

[squigz]

In what way would that enforce standards?

[lukan]

Well, the same way google can enforce their standards via chrome.

(I did not say it is a realistic goal for a theoretical comitee)

[motorest]

> A great idea executed horribly.

No. It's sabotage.

[1oooqooq]

exactly.

i don't understand how everyone ignores that w3c is mostly staffed by companies in adtech.

their goal is to keep adtech viable and profitable. Microsoft with ie, and then google with chrome, are just extra pushes to this end. but the main effort is w3c.

disclaimer: was one of the aforementioned grunts in a more naive life.

[IshKebab]

Isn't W3C fairly irrelevant these days?

[FinnKuhn]

The EU uses the WCAG 2.0 to define web accessibility in multiple acts and directives, some of which were passed pretty recently.[1]

[1] https://www.w3.org/WAI/policies/european-union/

[hackrmn]

They're very far from irrelevant, depends on what kind of Web development you do, I would say -- I have been writing WebAssembly by hand (I mean, a lot can be said about that but it's a thing) and the spec. is authored by W3C. There's plenty of other things they author, like, you know, either one of the many _CSS_-related specifications.

It's just that with the modern Web 7.0 (or whatever version we're on now), it's WHATWG that's most prominent since there's that one spec that defines 90% of what happens on the Web, it's called "The HTML standard" or some such. Then you have Google de-facto authoring specs., which may or may not find their way back into the HTML document, but even if they don't, they do make you feel like W3C is left behind.