W3C working group will shelve Web Intents

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3 points·Udo··4 comments

The linked email is a call for consensus which, if adopted, would have the effect of the headline, but neither it nor any of the replies currently indicate that that proposal has been adopted, so the headline seems premature/overstated.

Traffic on the Web Intents mailing list has been low for the last few months. Browser and website adoption has stagnated. The spec has become huge and unwieldy, and has drifted widely out of scope. Participants have moved on to other things. The group has recognized this and I think the Nokia people are right to assume that if WebIntents comes back one day, it will probably be with a wholly different approach. This is not premature in my opinion, it's just the official recognition of the project's state. There is no reason to believe the shelving will not occur, since it's being proposed by the people who are actually in charge of working out the spec.

I would love to be wrong, but that doesn't look likely. Compare the fanfare when WI was announced to the level of public interest now.

I'm not saying I think that the headline is wrong about what the path is, just that it is overstated as a description of the content of the email it links to. I haven't really been following WI all that closely, but my impression of the state of the project matches yours.

So they shelve something truly awesome and with massive promise, while they keep pushing ahead with Web-DRM which everyone external to the process has been utterly negative about.

W3C has sold itself to Hollywood and it has/will cost them their reputation, and ultimately their stewardship of the open web.

We need someone else to stand up and talk for the best of the web now.

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