(all quotes in this post are from the late Douglas Adams’ — mostly Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — all conclusions and statements are my own).

People of Earth your attention please…. regrettably, your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition… [panic…] There’s no point in acting surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now. … What do you mean you’ve never been to Alpha Centauri? Oh, for heaven’s sake, mankind, it’s only four light years away, you know. I’m sorry, but if you can’t be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that’s your own lookout.

The Web turns 25 this year, and the largest standards body/organization dedicated to it, the W3C, turns 20. When it was founded, the Web was new and the landscape of technology vastly different. There was so much excitement, those were heady days…

“In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.”

But the Web needs to compete and remain relevant and vibrant and the truth is that we remain far from the state of the art. We’re not keeping pace and the standard process sometimes feels like it was created by Vogons. At 20, I think it’s a good time to stop -pause and reflect and perhaps learn some things about what is and isn’t working. Let’s see if we can re-align the trajectory where necessary before it’s too late.

Cause and Effect…

Development of a standard often takes many years and involves a lot of fits and starts of discussion along the way and many of them are bike shedding and speculation about what developers want, how they will interpret something, what might lead to unintended abuses by developers, etc. People sometimes wait until it’s very late in the process to comment and wind up rehashing fundamental questions. No matter how open a group is, the number of people actively involved in the creation of a standard would often still fit into a small room (the acknowledgement section of most drafts gives you a fairly good idea) and they tend to be the largely same groups of folks. Finally, when we do get a recommendation, even with implementations, on many occasions the result doesn’t get a very warm reception, and even when there is initial excitement, it often doesn’t last.

The W3C is not ignorant of these things, and it’s not that there isn’t genuine concern — there is always talk on how to improve things. So why is it not dramatically better?

“This planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.”

I think it’s easy to misinterpret — these things are not the cause of our problems, they are the effect of our problems. It’s not the standards process that’s unhappy.

Developers: Mostly Harmless

Despite lots of discussion or proposals, the W3C has historically failed to find ways to engage developers in important and meaningful ways. This is a terrible problem when you think about it.

Real “standards” and interoperability don’t exist because a standards body publishes them, or even because an implementer implements them. There are examples of both which none of us would really consider “standard”. No, standards exist because developers use them. We help make the argument that businesses benefit by unprecedented interoperability, a global audience, a large pool of skilled workers. etc… We use them because they allow us to complete meaningful things in an accomplishable way.

Until they don’t.

At the end of the day, we usually work for someone else and have requirements that need to be met. There are lots of reasons why developers don’t participate on lists so much, but this is one of them: Often it can’t help us today. It’s difficult to justify to your employer that they should pay you for hours a week for things that, hopefully, might come into existence several years in the future.

What’s more, the confluence of individuals involved (businesses, implementers, developers) seems to never select (in an evolutionary sense) the most technically or academically superior answer, yet historically, this has been ignored by segments of the membership and affects the larger direction. Prognostication at this level impossibly hard for a small group, especially when it leaves out or systematically tends to dampen perhaps the most important voice.