Talk:Web standards
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[edit] W3C is not the only source of web standards
Web standards should not redirect to W3C. Sure the W3C has published the official recommendations for many standards, but not all of them (RSS & microformats, for example). And web standards is so much more than just what the w3c lays down. I'm removing the redirect, putting a stub page up for now. Come on, with all the great web folks on wikipedia, this page should be enlightening. - Crenner 22:32, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Web standards movement
MJB, I think you're confusing web standards (as in the 'web standards movement') with internet standards here. When web professionals use the term 'web standards' they're talking about building sites with XHTML and CSS (separation of content and presentation), usability, accessibility, etc. Web standards has nothing to do with the unicode standard or internet protocols. It's true that these are not neccessarily 'standards' in the traditional sense. This article should be more clear on that, but you can't deny the meaning of web standards—do a google search. Zeldman's book, 456 Berea Street, all XHTML and CSS stuff. And when the w3c shows up first, why shouldn't they be mentioned in the article? What does "do not misrepresent the W3C as a disinterested body - it is a bunch of coporations" mean? The w3c is an independent non-profit body, and it's contribution to the state of web practices today are certainly worth mention. -Crenner 19:36, 6 February 2006 (UTC)
- Is this an article about the Web standards movement? Looks to me like an article about Web standards, as in, standards applicable to the Web —or, given the article's intro, selected standards of interest to a certain, vocal class of Web site developers during the rise of the Firefox browser (mid-2003 to present). If it is about the movement (for which a Google search on "Web standards movement" reveals sufficient documentation, and not just on webstandards.org), then it should be renamed.
- Obviously I'm a bit skeptical of the movement's motives, as it seems to be closely related to pro-Firefox (and to a lesser extent, pro-OSS) campaigns. Its advocates seem to be rather selective in which standards they care about; we must do WP:No original research, which in this case means we can't use Wikipedia as a means of solidifying the definition of "Web standards" to mean only those selected Web-related standards that proponents of the movement want the term to apply to. The way I see it, "Web standards" is a very general term that is being hijacked, and we have to be careful how it is presented here.
- Regarding the characterization of the W3C, casual proponents of the movement tend to imply in their writings that all Web standards are the product of disinterested bodies that only generate well-thought-out specifications in advance of implementations, and that software that deviates from said specs is undermining the usability of the Web. The reality is that W3C is far, far from the neutral guardian of principles that people want to believe. While some of its 'standards' are actually fairly principled and preceded commercial implementations (like CSS2, XML, XHTML, XPath1, XSLT, RDF), there are many other examples where W3C Recommendations are rubber-stamps on existing commercial technologies (HTML3, CSS1, DOM, Ruby) and/or reflect the way certain corporate W3C members want people to do things (DOM again, XML Schema, XQuery, XPath2). Some of these are more contentious than others, but the point remains that the W3C is an industry consortium and its non-profit status is misleading; its Working Groups aren't exactly evil, but they aren't exactly BSD cathedrals, let alone GNU/Linux bazaars.
- Regarding the inclusion of non-W3C standards, I think as you mentioned in your comment about the redirect, the W3C is not the sole producer of specifications for the Web, nor even of specs of particular interest to advocates of the Web standards movement. I had specific standards in mind when listing each organization, and chose my words carefully so as not to imply that all of their publications qualified. For example, aside from the many specs that aren't directly relevant to the creation and use of Web sites, the IETF (and related IANA) is responsible for the HTTP protocol, defines IRI and URI syntax and general semantics, defines specific URI schemes, and names & refines character encodings. A web browser that tries to support HTML
<form>s without making an effort to adhere to these specs is going to have a hard time interoperating with code and servers that do. If those specs are not "Web standards", then we need a better definition and a better article title (again, without doing original research).
- I think the article still needs a lot more content and explanations, hence it's still a stub. I just wanted to start to steer it away from what I see as a very selective definition of "Web standards". If it were renamed to "Web standards movement" it might make things a little easier, although I'm sure there's a ton of Wikipedians who'd be interested in a more general article (or list) of Web standards. — mjb 03:28, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
I've just rewritten and expanded the intro a bit so that it better reflects what I'm trying to say, and puts things into better context. See what you think. — mjb 23:22, 8 February 2006 (UTC)
I meant to reply much earlier. Sorry. Yeah, the article I intended to start was indeed Web standards movement. I like what you've done with this one—I thought we already had an article on web/internet standards in general, but I haven't been able to find it. I think this page is necessary, and I'll go ahead and start working on a Web standards movement page. - Crenner 19:47, 10 February 2006 (UTC)
