Like W3C? “Standards” funded by Google’s ad monopoly? How is that going for them? The demand for everything to be “free” is destroying the idea of neutral standard. Standard must be funded somehow. The ISO model has worked for decades. The W3C model, where you don’t charge for either the standard or the products, has become a tire fire.
The W3C's failures pale in comparison to what I hear of the ISO MPEG process, in which companies compete to put as much of their patented technology in the codec standard as possible without any regard for coherence. ISO is worse than the W3C.
ISO at least still releases real standards with multiple implementations. Web standards by contrast have basically become a pretense, as the actual standard is defined by Google’s implementation.
I mean, to some degree that's true, but that's not anything the W3C can do anything about. It's just the nature of the browser market at this time.
As an example, C++, also an ISO standard, has notoriously few full implementations, and as a result C++ is largely defined by "what GCC/Clang accept" in practice.
It's even worse than that; the way you end up getting a license to these patented codecs (that are now part of the standard), you end up buying access to codec pools from groups like MPEG-LA. This isn't inherently bad, but the price of buying a license to these pools doesn't typically decrease, even when some (or most) of the patents in that pool expire.
Just because the standard is free does not mean that any single implementation is, you are free to charge for software implementing a standard just as you would be otherwise.
A proper standard needs to be free (both as in speech and beer), otherwise it needs investment to see that a implementation meets the standard (which in itself goes against the idea of having standards) or to modify it to propose improvements.
The work of developing standards can be done by people/companies who benefit from the standard, either financially or via other ways and those people/companies have their motivations to work on it.
I respectfully disagree. I’d much rather pay $50 for a browser, part of which goes to paying for the R&D and the standard, than have the status quo, where you have a de facto standard based on the implementations defined “by the companies who benefit from the standard.” Because that’s just turned into the ad tech industry dictating browser standards. I don’t think that’s healthy. It was way better when you had something like POSIX, which was defined by multiple competing vendors, where the R&D was paid for by license fees, than the “free” ecosystem where everything is bankrolled by ad money.
Open standards organizations in general and the W3C in particular were in full swing long before Google existed and will continue to do meaningful work long after Google's ad monopoly gets broken up or disrupted into irrelevance.
It takes a special kind of singlemindedness to look at modern web standards and the open source WebKit ecosystem, dismiss their wild, outsized success as a tire fire, and call for more corporate exclusivity as the solution.
Comments
Like W3C? “Standards” funded by Google’s ad monopoly? How is that going for them? The demand for everything to be “free” is destroying the idea of neutral standard. Standard must be funded somehow. The ISO model has worked for decades. The W3C model, where you don’t charge for either the standard or the products, has become a tire fire.
The W3C's failures pale in comparison to what I hear of the ISO MPEG process, in which companies compete to put as much of their patented technology in the codec standard as possible without any regard for coherence. ISO is worse than the W3C.
ISO at least still releases real standards with multiple implementations. Web standards by contrast have basically become a pretense, as the actual standard is defined by Google’s implementation.
I mean, to some degree that's true, but that's not anything the W3C can do anything about. It's just the nature of the browser market at this time.
As an example, C++, also an ISO standard, has notoriously few full implementations, and as a result C++ is largely defined by "what GCC/Clang accept" in practice.
It's even worse than that; the way you end up getting a license to these patented codecs (that are now part of the standard), you end up buying access to codec pools from groups like MPEG-LA. This isn't inherently bad, but the price of buying a license to these pools doesn't typically decrease, even when some (or most) of the patents in that pool expire.
Just because the standard is free does not mean that any single implementation is, you are free to charge for software implementing a standard just as you would be otherwise.
A proper standard needs to be free (both as in speech and beer), otherwise it needs investment to see that a implementation meets the standard (which in itself goes against the idea of having standards) or to modify it to propose improvements.
The work of developing standards can be done by people/companies who benefit from the standard, either financially or via other ways and those people/companies have their motivations to work on it.
I respectfully disagree. I’d much rather pay $50 for a browser, part of which goes to paying for the R&D and the standard, than have the status quo, where you have a de facto standard based on the implementations defined “by the companies who benefit from the standard.” Because that’s just turned into the ad tech industry dictating browser standards. I don’t think that’s healthy. It was way better when you had something like POSIX, which was defined by multiple competing vendors, where the R&D was paid for by license fees, than the “free” ecosystem where everything is bankrolled by ad money.
Open standards organizations in general and the W3C in particular were in full swing long before Google existed and will continue to do meaningful work long after Google's ad monopoly gets broken up or disrupted into irrelevance.
It takes a special kind of singlemindedness to look at modern web standards and the open source WebKit ecosystem, dismiss their wild, outsized success as a tire fire, and call for more corporate exclusivity as the solution.