Jeffrey Zeldman‘s latest post on the W3C had me thinking a bit about standards.
Zeldman writes:
Some of the best minds working in web standards have been quietly or loudly abandoning the W3C. Bjoern Hoehrmann is the latest. His reasons for leaving make compelling reading (hat tip: Terje Bless). I believe in W3C standards, particularly the ones you and I use every day, but I worry about the direction in which the W3C is headed.
This reminded me of a recent discussion in the comments for Reflection.js v1.5. I argued that even though HTML 5 and Web Forms 2 weren’t developed by the W3C but the WHATWG, they were still standards. Determining whether something is a standard isn’t black and white – there are standards created because everyone using them (e.g. MS Office and Flash) even though they are proprietary and other people can’t implement them.
There are standards such as OpenID and RSS 3.0 which seem to have been developed by a community or an individual but which have never taken off. And then there are the standards ratified by the W3C or IETF which no one cares about. If a specification says one thing but everybody implements it differently, are the people using it being non-standard or is the specification a non-standard?
For me, a standard is simply a convention where people agree to use a piece of technology in the same way. It doesn’t matter who developed it or whether it is recognised by some self-decreed standards organization.
On the subject of HTML 5, I’m a big fan. It’s an opportunity for progressive enhancement and solutions which really solve real-world problems rather than the W3C’s XHTML 2.0 which reinvents the wheel for no good reason and doesn’t actually solve any of the problems anybody has.
In my opinion, if things like this continue to happen and standards are not released and maintained by one body then web standards will become like the different electricity standards around the world. Although this may not be the best analogy, it shows what might happen. Although different countries use different voltages and different socket types, it all does the same thing – powers our appliances. If many bodies release different web standards some people will use one, some the other and eventually, browsers may have to choose which to follow.