Standard Argument

Web Standards,

This post from Molly about HTML5 and the W3C, and the resulting comments, illustrate very well why the process of making or improving standards is so ugly, and why I don’t participate anymore. Discussions are dominated chiefly by people who have time to dominate discussions, which over time includes fewer and fewer of the people who actually should.

Open Source has the same problem and can usually survive it through things like rapid iteration, plugin systems, benevolent dictators, and easy forking. However I don’t know if those concepts could be successfully applied to a standards process, almost by definition.

WordCamp Events Friday

Asides

There are two events happening before WordCamp officially kicks off on Saturday. Tomorrow at 1 PM there is a meetup at Crossroads Cafe which should be a lot of fun. And then at 6:30 there’s a dinner meetup organized by Niall at a neat place called Taylor’s Automatic Refresher, which is an outdoor beer and burger place at the Ferry Building. (Same place we met last year.) It’s cafeteria style, and we’ll be outside chatting. San Francisco evenings tend to get chilly near the water so bring a jacket.