W3C to become a public-interest non-profit organization
w3.org
w3.org
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/open-letter-w3c-direct...
I would like to hear more from people connected with W3C over the years as to why it ran into the long grass. Some commentators have even described it as "irrelevant today". I'd like to think that's wrong and W3C has an important future keeping a public and accessible World Wide Web alive.
Among the many questions in my head:
What is the "Web" today, 30 years on?
What can the W3C realistically do to steward it?
Have principles of universality and accessibility been abandoned?
Can there be a WORLD WIDE Web in the age of state firewalls and the "splinternet"?
Does the W3C have overlays and censorship resistance on its roadmap?
Does the W3C recognise the need for Small Internet technologies, Gemini and suchlike as a reliable, accessible and simple information delivery network?
I imagine that the w3c saw that large corporations had most of the attention of most netizens. Those large content producers/distributers want DRM. Did the w3c fear that if they hadn't accepted EME, most of those netizens would move off the web and onto the native apps which the video streaming companies would, inevitably, have produced?
I say "inevitably" because most of them stream to native and web anyway these days, and in many cases the native apps are wrappers around HTML5 players. In a way, the w3c's acceptance of EME allowed its reach to extend to more devices, where if they hadn't taken EME on the web may have shrunk.
(I'm kinda just thinking out loud here. Sorry for the rambling)
Streaming is a tiny portion of what the web is used for.
Even so, entertainment should be... entertaining. I got free Paramount Plus with my phone service. It has DRM, adblocker-detectors, and all sorts of other nonsense to where it usually doesn't play videos. I went with Youtube over Star Trek. That's not an ideological choice; it's just not entertaining to fight with computers to play a video or to talk to support.
I suspect the effect would have been the opposite: a more rapid decline of the major content producers. This stuff needs to be easy and to work. Netflix did that, before everyone started to jump ship. Napster did it well too.
At some point, there's a spiral, where:
- Declining usability / quality leads to declining viewership
- Declining viewership leads to declining budget
- Declining budget lead to declining usability / quality and more pressure on monetization
... and so on. That's the disruption S-curve. In retrospect, I'm guessing that would have happened if large content producers forced apps.
By bandwidth, streaming is what the majority of the web is used for. PDF warning: https://www.sandvine.com/hubfs/downloads/phenomena/2018-phen...
> Video is almost 58% of the total downstream volume of traffic on the internet
The real specs that all the browsers and media vendors used for DRM are vendor-specific closely guarded secrets, as they have always been.
The only purpose the spec ever had was laundering DRM with W3C's reputation.
Pretty much all streaming companies of DRM protected content use EME with Widevine as the CDM. How is it useless if everyone is using it?
The EME spec only documents how to use a "Clear Key" scheme that is a complete trash defeated in 1 line of code, and of course not allowed by any website with DRM.
The EME spec says nothing about Widevine or any real-world DRM API. The CDM side, that does 99.99% of the actual work, is not documented in the EME spec. It's only a hypothetical construct alluded to in the spec, but not an actual API. The actual browser implementations don't even use the architecture outlined in the EME spec. Almost all of the EME spec is non-normative, or for the decoy Clear Key non-DRM.
EME is like a spec that says Adobe Flash is <object type="application/vnd.adobe.flash" />. There, Adobe Flash is now an open web standard. You have everything you need to handle .swf files without plug-ins, except the content playback module, which is a detail left for each vendor to figure out.
The user-agent is still relying on the same interfaces and concepts (MediaKeySession, key id, same events, same methods, same way to persist licenses) and the application generally can work transparently without doing exceptions for each key system (well, in reality, there are a lot of compatibility bugs in a lot ot EME implementations, but those are not on purpose).
For example the server certificate concept generally does not apply to clear key implementations at all but is frequently used when using Widevine.
Clearkey is thoroughly documented because that is the only key system that SHOULD be implemented in all user agents with an EME implementation, though nobody, even the writers of that specification, think that it is a good idea for real production usage.
In my work we rely a lot on the EME specification, and refered to it many times in exchanges with our partners when we thought that their CDM implementations (e.g. on specific set-top boxes, smart tvs, game consoles etc.) lead to non-compliance to that spec (e.g. unusable keys not being properly announced etc.).
_PS: off-topic but I came across your projects and comments online many times, IIRC mostly about image encoders / decoders and on Rust (both subjects on which I love to read). That was always very interesting, thanks!_
So I am really thankful for EME for helping to support open standards in that regard.
When you say "released", do you mean they're pirated almost immediately? Or is there now a legit way to get non-pirated content that I'm not aware of?
To simplify, for music you just choose if you want the additional services offered by Spotify or Apple and not focusing on what catalogue it has (barring some obscure asterisks), while this is the polar opposite has happened on music industry and now you are either actively researching where goes what or just gave up and pirate. As Gabe Newell has said, give the consumers a better service and they'll use it. Record companies succumbed and quietly accept this, studios don't (and I'll wager that they will eventually accept to have a single service).
The end result may be comparable, but I think the principle of it is important.
“principles” is another word for being irrational and nonstrategic.
That's pretty much what we got with EME, since the technology relies on proprietary plugins. The only difference is that EME got a pointless stamp of approval from the W3C as supposedly a part of the "open" Web, even though there's nothing open about DRM-encumbered media.
That situation truly opened my eyes to the fact that for most people, pragmatic arguments of the kind of “We cannot stop drugs anyway, so we better legalize it, so we can better regulate it.” really seem to only apply when they already agree and that the same people who say it in one case suddenly are staunchly against such pragmaticism when it no longer fly their way.
d.r.m. would be there regardless of what the W.3.C. would do and at the time the lesser of two evils was certainly the W.3.C. having control over the specification to some degree.
I didn't know actually the E.F.F. had such a position, I felt it was the last agent in internet transparency and freedom that hadn't gone insane. It's a sad thing to read but I won't be donating to it any more if such is it's modus operandī.
Let's take a look at what W3C did lately, shall we?
W3C HTML 5.2 was published in 2017, based on WHATWG material. W3C HTML 5.3 was "published" as merely a commit vs WHATWG's HTML repo with a promise to keep further sanctioned snapshots, which didn't happen though. How could a snapshot of WHATWG's phonebook-sized "living standard" thing be consistent and deserving of the "standard" badge anyway?
CSS being such a crap specification, and absurdly outside its scope, the only reason of its existence seems to be an organizational stalemate, where Google let W3C have some token significance in web specs and give long-term CSS editors job security. At the cost of giving up any mental discipline, and even versioning, with the goal of encumbering the web to the point of no return.
The state of web browsers is so abysmal, it could hardly be any worse. That situation should've been avoided by a competent real standardization body. But TBL is busy with completely irrelevant stuff such as XML and RDF.
Sorry TBL, you might be a nice guy and tinkerer, but a manager you're not.
Time to take standardization to ISO or another "real" standardization body.
I agree with you it hasn't been accomplishing it very well though.
If you want to see how the web could be worse, do this.
The ISO process is openly hostile to the development of royalty-free standards. You can direct a lot of criticism towards the W3C, but they got the patent policy right.
https://www.oxebridge.com/emma/latest-blog-posts/
And almost every time I read anything from there, I just… Ugh. I don't even know where to start with describing the extent of just how much of a shitshow ISO represents.
Edit, perhaps like this:
After for many years intensely thinking about the organizational problems involved, I've come to a conclusion which seems rather very absurd to me:
ISO could only deteriorate to this degree because of two things:
1. An absurd number of decades-long-standing bugs in Microsoft Word's Master Documents feature: http://www.addbalance.com/word/MasterDocHudson.htm. This tacitly yet tremendously increases the organisational costs of writing policy, process documentation, work instructions, &c. documents in a truly fully standardized manner (don't even get me started about ISO authoring tools, especially not about their internal ones. Microsoft Word Wizard .wiz files. I almost fell from my seat when I originally learned of that.); many of those working in pure IT organisations fail to realize this because there exist a lot of workarounds implementable when one has a large tech-affine workforce, but these workarounds don't work in large traditional enterprises. Some of those have invested in workarounds—most haven't, think they couldn't, and thus won't.
2. A feature parity gap in the file save dialog behaviors of Microsoft Excel (Filename suggestion doesN'T get pre-populated based on Document Title file metadata field) when compared to those of Microsoft Word (Filename suggestion DOES get pre-populated based on Document Title file metadata field). This makes semverdoc.org enforcement impossible in large organisations still stuck in e-mail–as–version–control–for–Microsoft–Excel–land, i.e. the majority of them, and There no replacement exists for Microsoft Excel in most large enterprises.
Everything else seems like it just mostly comes down to sociopaths hiding behind cluelessly middle-managed misunderstandings.
And the really sad thing:
If said sociopaths really grok'd all of this, they'd probably do their damnest to undo this middle management incompetency compensation competence failure, because while it might seem like this ends up profiting /someone/, it actually does seem like it actually represents one of those rather very rare true loss–loss–loss scenarios.
Come to think of it, see also:
The subtle horror of IBM's Zachman Framework, as well as technical writing skills:
https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=31896609
Well… And then there's simply this comic:
https://www.oxebridge.com/emma/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/06...
How is CSS not versioned? CSS may be complex and have a lot of baggage, but that is what happens with any language that grows and evolves over time. I don't see how that relates to giving CSS editors job security, especially given that they are doing a lot to provide modern and advanced capabilities in a way that is implementable and addresses users needs.
XML and RDF may be irrelevant to you, but they are not irrelevant to everyone.
Standard noobie here. Isn't ISO C++ a cautionary tale against that?
The info on that is still up here: https://www.w3.org/Consortium/facts
Beihang University spends roughly 60% of its research budget on defense research (https://www.aspi.org.au/report/china-defence-universities-tr...). The People's Republic of China has done everything it can to shut down the open Web (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/chinas-global-reach-su...) while turning digital platforms, communications networks, and other technologies into tools of mass control and surveillance. Why is Beihang involved in hosting the W3C?
Hard to call oneself a standards community if you're missing representation from nearly a fifth of all users.
Why is MIT? Do you not have an issue with them also getting funding from the American defense department? Or if you're concerned with the open web, do you not remember when they persecuted Aaron Swartz for the heinous crime of downloading knowledge?
I wouldn't be surprised if it's similar, but I haven't found it lazily googling.
Most academic CS and IT research in the US is defense-funded, has been all along. Most other countries too. So any reasonable academic home of a web-related entity is likely to have it's research budget be mostly defense funded.
I think we should absolutely do that. MIT's figure is going to be nowhere close to 60%.
https://web.mit.edu/fnl/vol/155/numbers_research_total.htm
> Most academic CS and IT research in the US is defense-funded, has been all along.
That also is false. It's nowhere close to "most" across all US CS and IT research.
2020 numbers. DOD is 17%
Curious what the Department of Energy grants are about, and what overlap it ends up having with defense purposes if it's nuclear. That's the second biggest source of research funding at 15%. 18+15==33%, still not 60%.
> That also is false. It's nowhere close to "most" across all US CS and IT research.
I'd be curious to see numbers for that too, for MIT CS department(s) specifically, and in general in the US. I have definitely known a lot of CS professors and projects with DARPA and other DoD funding, it is quite common.
And maybe substantially more...
And here we have a $9.6 billion contract (albeit not for just one year, i'm sure) that wasn't included... it does seem like that earlier chart was not very comprehensive.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation_...
Notably NCSA, which provided the first telnet client, web browser and web server that most people used prior to the DotCom boom.