from Hacker News

The Web as the ultimate tool of resilience for the world

by sendilkumarn on 3/28/22, 12:01 PM with 52 comments

  • by zozbot234 on 3/28/22, 1:05 PM

    The W3C has endangered long-term resilience on the Web by supporting misguided efforts like EME, which aim to add a requirement for de-facto proprietary "plugins" to the open Web platform. Why should they deserve our support?

  • by 0des on 3/28/22, 1:18 PM

    W3C wew. Where do we even start?

    Let's begin with a polite thank you for your service, a hot drink, maybe some type of certificate of acknowledgment that says like "you were present." and then call it day.

    But beyond that, in my opinion, W3C has been a disaster since day 1. It seems like some people with good intentions decided one day they could just play RFC roulette and maybe if they slipped enough nonsense into their content that nobody would notice, and we would just all play along and build the misshapen web they were imagining.

  • by 323 on 3/28/22, 3:22 PM

    W3C is irrelevant these days.

    The "Web" is what Google decides it to be - what new APIs to add to Chrome, what protocols to use (HTTP/2, HTTP/3) to access it.

  • by gmfawcett on 3/28/22, 1:04 PM

    What is the relationship between W3C and WHATWG these days? I haven't been following that story for years now -- at the time it seemed that W3C was losing relevance, and that WHATWG was becoming the de facto standards keeper for web tech.

  • by jddil on 3/28/22, 3:07 PM

    This is going to come off as glib but the W3C has no relevance anymore, it exists to give the WHATWG the stamp of approval on it's RFCs. It's like the grandfather you give deference to but hasn't been relevant in years.

    They may still "control" css and xml (not sure the exhaustive list) but I don't understand why those haven't been moved to WHATWG as well.

  • by zanethomas on 3/28/22, 4:36 PM

    "As we reflect on the past two years of altered life amid the pandemic, the importance of the web and all it enables has been on high display. "

    Including all the censorship enabled.

  • by gambler on 3/28/22, 2:12 PM

    "A web for everyone" turned out to be a lie.

    The web architecture made it trivial to manipulate information and cancel people. Nothing in the protocols deals with archiving or true redundancy. Nothing deals with DDoS or bypassing censorship. The architecture itself encourages centralization. Moreover, the protocols are currently being manipulated to encourage even more central control.

    We're way past the point where expressing sentiments like "this is for everyone" is aspirational. Right now it's merely out of touch and tone-deaf.