Nothing Too Overwhelming
by Bijan Parsia
There’s a new HTML working group.
I’m not sure what to make of it overall. It seems to involve some admission of prior wrong-directionness at the W3C; indeed, a strong concession to the WHATWG (and not the first).
On the other hand, the new group seems rather popular. As of today, there are 223 registered members.
223.
Interestingly, only 37 are employee’s of W3C member orgs (and only 11 orgs!). So that’s 186 invited experts!
So, it’s a pretty open group. I wonder if this signals a general shift in the W3C away from a strong “pay to play” orientation. I don’t know that this policy, at least wrt HTML, diminishes the value of membership, per se (which involves some pretty hefty fees on top of the participation burden). Bringing HTML back into the fold (or bringing the W3C back into the HTML fold) probably has quite a bit of branding value all around. I guess a big corp could try to free ride, but really, what’s $60,000 a year to a really big corp? It’s dwarfed by the participation expense.
There are 547 messages from March 7 to March 26. Yeek.
Let me just say how profoundly relieved I am at not being even remotely involved!
