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Comment by belluchan | Hacker News Reader

Can't we just fork the w3? Start using Firefox and forget about these people. Oh I'm sorry your browser is a little slower, but at least it's not Google made.

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Fork the W3C? This is pretty much happened with HTML. The W3C membership voted against chartering a group to work on progressive improvements to HTML (v. XHTML2), initially in the form of Web Forms 2.0, and so the WHATWG was born.

The big problem is copyright on all the specs is owned by the W3C. Oh, you want to spec CSS? Well, then you have to do it from scratch. Yes, HTML is now at a point where it is better specified than ever, and more interoperable than ever, but it's been a long, hard journey there. Consider the spec has been worked on for over a decade now. Respecifying, from scratch, large parts of the web platform is an incredibly large undertaking, especially ensuring the spec defines something compatible with almost all web content when browsers frequently disagree in edge-cases with up-until-now unspecified behaviour.

are you serious?! copyright instead of left on the standards for the "open" web? wtf

The background on this issue: http://www.w3.org/2010/Talks/doclicense-20100323/ and rationale: http://www.w3.org/2010/01/licfaq.html#consequences

thanks very much. am i right in that the main reason for this is that forking is undesired? how is that helpful to an open system?

The view is that forking of specs leads to a multitude of specs, thereby making interoperability harder, and ultimately making the system less open.

You don't need to re-specify anything from scratch. Copyright does not prevent you from referencing the existing documents.

If you can get people to stop using Chrome, Safari, and IE en masse over this issue that might have the effect you describe. Anything else won't, because the problem here is not the W3C per se but that those three browsers are very happily implementing this stuff (already shipping it in releases in the case of Chrome on ChromeOS and IE 11) whether the W3C actually specs it or not.

Oddly enough, the people producing those three browsers just happen to all be DRM system vendors (WideVine, FairPlay, and PlayReady). Who would think they're want to build their own DRM systems into their browsers, eh?

In order to "fork" the w3, you would have to make a new organization that would create a standard replacement, convince people to make browsers for it, convince server operators to support it, and convince people to create content with it. Granted, this is more simplified then it what would actually need to happen, so no, you cannot "just fork" the w3.

Don't forget the non-trivial task of avoiding whatever structural pressures that started the w3 on the path you hope to avoid.

The "Animal Farm" problem.

I'm not sure what you're talking about. Mozilla is a W3C member organization.

Perhaps you're thinking of something like the WHATWG? (bad news for you on the Google front if it is)

Or your browser is faster, depending on what you're doing.

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