Thoughts From Eric Archive

My first suggestion for improving the W3C is this:  every Working Group should have one member whose primary (and possibly sole) responsibility is outreach.

To make life a little easier, I’m going to refer to this position as a WGO (for Working Group Outreach).  As an aside, I’m not sure that “outreach” is exactly the right term for what I have in mind, but it’s a decent term that captures most of what I have in mind, so I’ll use it here.  If someone comes up with a better term, I’ll be grateful.

So here’s what I envision for a WGO.

1. The WGO keeps the public informed about the top issues on the Working Group’s agenda and immediate-future activities.  The easiest, most obvious way to do this is to post a summary of every WG FTF (face-to-face) meeting.  A summary would describe the topics the WG discussed, resolutions that were reached, which problems were not solved, and so forth.  This could be a bullet-point list, but a better summary would be something like a short article.

   Note that I do not say that the WGO should post the FTF minutes, which are often private.  The results of those discussions, though, should be public, even when no results occurred.  A summary can say that the WG discussed a topic at length and reached no resolution without saying why.  It can also say that a topic was discussed and a solution found, and then describe the solution.

   A really good WGO would produce an activity summary more often than every FTF.  I don’t know that I’d insist on a summary for every weekly teleconference, but sending out a summary once a month would be more than reasonable.  These summaries would be posted on the W3C site and to the relevant public mailing lists.  For the CSS WGO, this would always mean posting to www-style.  In cases where WG activity touched on features of XHTML or SVG, summary posts would be made to those public lists as well.

   The purpose here is to draw back some of the curtain surrounding Working Groups.  Too often, interested members of the public don’t know what the WG is up to, and that can be frustrating.  If there are several people agitating for a new feature and the WG stays silent on it, it’s impossible to tell if the WG is blowing the idea off or if it’s something they’ve considered at length but haven’t yet reached a decision.

   Public summaries also have the benefit of allowing some public discussion of work before the public-comment period on a proposed specification.  This would help distribute the WG’s feedback load.

2. The WGO brings the needs and concerns of the public to the Working Group, and communicates back the WG’s reactions.  This means part of the WGO’s job is to be involved in the wider community surrounding a given activity.  The CSS WGO, for example, would spend time reading web design mailing lists, forums, blogs, and so forth to find out what people in the field want and need (in CSS terms, anyway).  The WGO would present these to the WG as items to consider.  The topics so raised, and the WG’s responses to them, would go into the next summary.

   The goal here, of course, is to have someone on the Working Group who represents the “in the trenches” folks.  If there are other members of the WG who also represent those who work in the field, that’s awesome.  With the WGO position, though, there’s the assurance of at least one person who speaks for those who actually use the products of the Working Group, and who will use any future products.

3. The presence of a WGO in a Working Group should be a charter condition.  No group should be (re-)chartered without an identified WGO, and the extended lack of a WGO should be cause to question the continued charter of a group.

   Basically, I’m of the opinion that if a WG can’t find someone passionate enough about what they’re doing to be the WGO, then it’s time to ask whether or not they should continue at all.  Similarly, if there’s no real community for the WGO to represent, then it’s time to ask why the WG even exists.

4. The WGO should have no other major responsibilites within the Working Group.  This means the WGO cannot be the WG’s chair, and should not be a specification editor.  Their primary job should be the two-way representation I’ve described here.

   It’s too easy to get overloaded in a WG, especially if you’re the kind of enthusiast a good WGO should be.  There needs to be a defined limit to the position, so that outreach is always topmost on that person’s agenda within the WG, and it doesn’t get buried under other duties.

In summary, a good WGO would act as a liason between the Working Group and the community surrounding it.  A great WGO would do all that and also produce information that helps expand that community.  They could publish quick how-to’s, for example, concentrating on either current or near-future specifications.

If you could, please allow me to illustrate my points with a few things that a CSS WGO might do in the course of their duties.  I’ll call this CSS WGO “Bob” to make the example less clumsy.

Recently, Bob’s been seeing a lot of calls on blogs for an “ancestor” selector.  This would be something that lets you say, “style this element based on its descendants”, such as styling all links that contain an image without having to class them.  (This idea has come up many times in the past, by the way, but has yet to be added to CSS.)  So Bob brings the “ancestor selector” subject to the WG.  The WG says, “Yes, that’s a very good idea, but it runs aground on the following problems.”  Bob would then put all that into his next summary: “The WG is in favor of adding the ancestor selector, but the following problems prevent its inclusion…”  Bob could certainly also communicate the response directly, through mailing lists or blogs, instead of just putting the response in the summary.  The latter is necessary, of course, but doing both is better.

How is this better?  Because the community knows the WG has considered the idea, where the WG stands on the idea, and the reasons why it hasn’t been accepted.  Everyone knows where the sticking points lie, and can make suggestions to overcome them, instead of just guessing as to why the requested feature hasn’t been adopted.  As for the reasons, they could be anything from “that’s demonstrably impossible in an entropic universe” to “not enough implementors have committed to doing it”.  As long as we know what the roadblock is, we can act accordingly.

Furthermore, Bob might accompany a new version of the Advanced Layout module with a quick how-to article that describes how to do a certain common layout, one that’s very hard to do in current CSS, with the stuff in the new module.  This provides a quick, “wow cool!” introduction to the WG’s efforts, which can energize the community and also draw in new people.

I will readily grant that many WGs have what are effectively unofficial WGOs; in a lot of ways, you could argue that I’ve been a WGO for years, as have several other people, through books and articles and forum participation and blogging and so on.  That’s not enough.  There needs to be someone inside the Working Group who is focused on explaining to the world what the WG is doing and who is explaining to the WG what the world is doing, or at least trying to do.

So that’s the first of my three major suggestions for reforming the W3C: an outreach person for every Working Group.

• W3C Change: Outreach was published on Friday, September 15th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the W3C category.
• There have been eighteen replies.

When I posted about the W3C, a few people responded with, “All right, fine, you’re angry with the W3C.  So what’s your alternative, smart guy?”  A fair enough question.

While I applaud the efforts of the WHAT WG and the microformats community, I’m not advocating a complete dismissal of the W3C.  The basic role filled by the W3C, that of being a central meeting place and coordinating body, is an important one.  It’s also potentially damaging.  Think of it like a central file server at work.  As long as the server is fine, your work can continue.  If it goes offline or, worse, its contents get corrupted, you’re in a very bad position.

When I point to the WHAT WG and microformats, I’m not holding them up as saviors or replacements.  I’m simply drawing attention to effects of the basic problem.  Both communities arose because of the nature and (lack of) speed of the W3C and its work.  We could argue about whether or not they should replace the W3C, but the simple fact is that had the W3C been more responsive and in touch with developer needs, they would never have existed in the first place.  They wouldn’t have had to exist.

If the W3C can get back on track, I wouldn’t want to see it replaced.  If it can’t, then it will be replaced, no matter what I or anyone else has to say.  That doesn’t mean it would cease to exist, of course.  It would simply become less and less relevant.  I have some ideas about how the W3C might avoid such a fate, but they aren’t things that I can cover in a single post.  Instead, I’ll do it in three parts, and the three topic areas I’m going to address are:

• Communication between Working Groups and the public
• Working Group membership and chartering rules
• The basic operating model of the W3C

No small potatoes, those.  It will be interesting to find out what people think of my proposals for each.

• W3C Change: Introduction was published on Thursday, September 14th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the W3C category.
• There have been eight replies.

I swear I haven’t forgotten the W3C thing.  Life has just gotten very (and largely unexpectedly) overwhelming of late, and I’ve been falling further and further behind on everything.  To make matters worse, the ideas I want to put forth regarding the W3C are really too long for a single post, no matter how much time I have available.  In fact, I think it’ll take three posts.  I hope to write those soon.  Then again, I’ve been hoping that about a lot of things recently, as my tax attorney and at least two editors can attest.

Before I let it slip any further away, though, I do want to belatedly mention that An Event Apart Austin is open for registration.  Also, this is a great opportunity to mention actual timely news: we’ve just this evening announced that our special guest speaker in Austin will be none other than Molly Holzschlag, who will be giving a talk on designing from the content out.

Don’t miss it, ya’ll!

• Running Toward Austin was published on Tuesday, September 12th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Speaking and Standards categories.
• There has been one reply.

Kat and I don’t really drink alcohol, so when we check into a hotel, we typically refuse the minibar key.  That way, we know that anything missing from the minibar has nothing to do with us.  Early on our morning of 11 September 2001, Kat was doing her best to break into the minibar in our hotel room in Sunnyvale, California.

“Kat”, I said hollowly, standing behind her, “I’m not sure this is really a valid coping mechanism.”

“What are you talking about?” she snapped.  “This is a perfectly valid coping mechanism!”

Not too much later, feeling the desperate need to be around other people, we went down to the hotel lobby, where several had clustered around the lounge television in silent horror.  There we discovered that the hotel management agreed with Kat: they were serving free drinks from the bar.  I was struck that day by how few drinks people actually consumed.  It was as if we were all so numbed that alcohol offered little further benefit.

What I remember most about that day is the confusion.  When we first turned on the TV, having been woken by a phone call from a friend, the crawl on CNN claimed a bomb had gone off outside the State Department.  There was a blurred image above it that I had trouble resolving for several seconds, before I finally realized it was the plume of smoke coming off of the Pentagon.  And when we saw the footage of the towers on fire, the South Tower being hit by a plane, and then both collapses, the images came one right after another in rapid sequence.  There was no extended period of horror for us, no building from one stage to the next.  We were literally jolted awake and passed in a very few minutes from Before to After.  It was difficult to grasp.  Almost impossible.

That afternoon, we drove almost aimlessly around Silicon Valley, listening to NPR even though they were covering the same few known facts in an endless loop, just like every other media outlet.  The difference was that with NPR, we did not have to watch the same few known videos in an endless loop.

We stopped for lunch, tried to talk about other things, and found we could not.  We kept going over what had happened, what we thought, what we feared.  Trying to clear up some of the confusion, trying to sift a little order out of the chaos, trying to steel ourselves for the possibility of worse to come.

We were a long way from home and family, but we were incredibly fortunate in that we were together.  It was an indescribable blessing in a day that seemed almost incapable of admitting them.  We clung together under an open blue California sky, so very much like the one over New York City, and each helped the other keep moving onward, one tentative step at a time.

• Five Years Ago was published on Monday, September 11th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.

For whatever reason, I actually prefer Pringle’s “Right Crisps”, which is the lower-fat version of the chip, to the regulars.  Still, Kat tries on occasion to introduce me to new things, and one recent attempt was a purchase of Pringles Prints.

Now, I think the idea of printing text on a potato chip is kind of cool, even if it’s in this kind of odd light Windex blue; I have to wonder what’s in the ‘ink’.  Disappointingly, the facts printed on the chips were pretty basic, not to mention focused almost solely on dinosaurs and elephants for the first half of the can.  I found this kind of funny, but admit it makes sense as I assume the target demographic for these chips is the kids, who love big animals.  But I don’t know how the folks at Proctor & Gamble can live with themselves when they’re pushing facts like, “Did you know?  Elephants do not live alone — they travel in herds.”

Maybe that’s a major revelation when you’re six, but I have to figure that if you know much of anything about elephants, you know that much.  I smell filler text.  Somebody was on a deadline to come up with a certain number of facts, and got desperate.

Anyway, I brought all this up because right near the middle of the can, I found out that even potato chip makers have to calibrate their printers.

You can see it in more detail on Flickr.

• Print Calibration Chip was published on Saturday, September 9th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Humor category.
• There has been one reply.

As someone who obtained a minor in Astronomy in college, and one of the only people I know who can consistently name the planets in order without having to resort to mnemonics, I’d like to take a moment out from the whole W3C thing to comment on the de-planetization of Pluto.

It’s about time.

Its classification as a planet was never really justifiable, and recent discoveries like 2003 UB313 (Xena) have only served to underscore that fact.

Now, that said, I’m no fan of the “dwarf planet” compromise.  That just smells of committee-think, and it’s got to go.  For that matter, the newly adopted definition for “planet” is pretty terrible.  If it were up to me, I’d go with a definition that was based on orbital characteristics and a minimum surface gravitational acceleration threshold—maybe size and density, too.  But none of this “cleared its orbital path” crap.

Furthermore, I think all this a great illustration of how science works.  Although it’s quite the fashion to talk about “scientific dogma”, what this shows is exactly how science works.  There is no inflexible dogma.  As new evidence emerges and is incorporated into the general body of knowledge, the “orthodoxy” changes.  There are no absolute truths in science—only the best available information.  Once we thought meat transformed directly into maggots; now we know otherwise.  Today we think that no physical object can move faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, but tomorrow (or a hundred years from now, or a thousand) we may find we were wrong.  It doesn’t mean anyone was wrong in their previous understanding.  It means simply that their previous understanding was incomplete.

And that’s fine.  In fact, it’s better than fine: it’s expected and, by and large, welcomed.  I often wonder if the real conflict between religion and science isn’t that science stands in opposition to religion, which it does not, but that science embodies a way of approaching the world that could not be more different than that taught by most religions.  There are no absolutes in science, no final immutable truths, nothing that cannot be supplanted by some new understanding.  Change may happen slowly, and it always happens after there is clear and convincing evidence, but it does happen.

As with Pluto.  At one time, it seemed like it could qualify as a planet.  Now it does not.  As we understand more about the universe, we will be able to formulate better definitions of what is a planet and what is not.  Maybe that will mean one day re-planetizing Pluto, and if so, then fine.  It’s all part of the process—excuse me, the method.

Maybe that’s a lot to hang on a change of classification for a tiny, frozen pile of rock, but it’s true nonetheless.  Or at least it will remain true until someone can convincingly show otherwise.

• Plutonian Process was published on Thursday, August 24th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Rants category.
• There have been twenty-nine replies.

In my head, at any rate, it was Jeffrey‘s angry post that kicked off the latest round of posts about consortium contretemps, even though Jeffrey’s post was triggered (at least in part) by a message posted to the fairly obscure public-qa-dev mailing list by Björn Höhrmann, detailing his reasons for leaving the W3C.

A little over a week later, there came a semi-rebuttal by Molly over at the Web Standards Project, where she talked about a new spirit of “opening up to new things”, like adding “at least one classically trained artist and graphic designer” to the CSS Working Group (a role that’s been more or less vacant ever since Jeff Veen left the WG over half a decade ago).

That’s great to hear, but what’s perversely fascinating to me is that in that very same post, Molly herself lists the reasons why Jeffrey’s anger is in no way misplaced:

Am I defending the W3C’s slow-to-move process or its over-bureaucratized administration? Its lack of attention and sensitivity to gender (count the women, go ahead, dare you) and racial diversity, its frightening disregard for the real needs of the workaday Web world? Oh no, nor would I want to.

It’s that last point that lends the greatest support to Jeffrey’s argument:  “…frightening disregard for the real needs of the workaday Web world”.

What more really needs to be said?  It’s the most concise indictment possible that the first part of the W3C’s mission statement, the fragment they put right on their home page, “Leading the Web to Its Full Potential…”, has been betrayed.

Believe me, I’d prefer things to be otherwise.  I’m still a strong believer in standards, and for seven years (1997 – 2004) put my time and energy into supporting and advancing them as a member of the CSS Working Group.  When I left, it was because I didn’t have the time and energy to contribute any more, and rather than continue to be a deadwood listing on the group’s roster, I left.  But most of the reason I couldn’t come up with the time and energy was precisely what Molly articulated.  I no longer believed in the W3C’s ability to do what it promised, and what I wanted.

But the worst part?  None of this is new.  Look back two years, when David Baron and Brendan Eich walked away from a W3C Workshop in disgust.  To a large degree, both men walked away from the W3C itself at that point—and if you’ve spurred David Baron to turn his back on the web’s central standards body, then boyo, you’ve got some deeply serious problems.

Let’s be frank: a whole lot of people who believe passionately in the web’s potential and want to see it advance fought for years to make that happen through the W3C, and finally decided they’d had enough.  One by one, I saw some of the best minds of my generation soured by the W3C; one by one, the embittered generals marched forward, determined to make some sort of progress.

Perhaps my eyes have become a touch too jaundiced over the last decade, but I’m not sure I could disagree more with what Molly claims near the end of her post:

Jeffrey is wrong in his current assessment of the W3C.

If only that were so.

If the folks at the WaSP believe the Good Ship Consortium is beginning to change course, then I’m happy for them, really; I’ll be even more happy if they’re right.  But when the ship is moving so slowly and has drifted so far out to sea, how much relevance can a change of heading really have?

• Angry Indeed was published on Monday, August 14th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Rants, Standards, and W3C categories.
• There have been forty-three replies.

As I ambled up Concourse C this afternoon, I spotted someone who looked an awful lot like Dennis Kucinich coming the other way.  I thought for a moment about stopping him for a bit of congratulatory chat—he’s pretty far to the left of even me, but I admire his staunch refusal to compromise his principles no matter how unpopular they may be—but he didn’t have a welcoming air about him.  Maybe he was having an off day, or maybe he’s always like that, but I figured a politician would always be open to meeting “the public”.  It seemed like something that would go with the career choice, but perhaps not.

About ten minutes after I saw him, there was an announcement over the public address system calling for Dennis Kucinich to return to gate C-24 for a lost item.

So I guess that even if he wasn’t having an off day when I saw him, he did later.  Based on where I saw him and the timing of the announcement, he was very likely beyond the secure area when it was made.  I’m not sure it’s possible to get through security on a used ticket; it seems like too much of a security risk to do so.  Then again, how would we know?

I wonder what it was he left on the plane.  (Let the political jokes take flight!)

P.S.  “Search all bags for liquids etc. at the gate” has become “search the bags of occasional random passengers at the gate”, at least in Cleveland.  So either the rules are already relaxing, or they’re still firming up.  I kind of hope it’s the latter, though neither one really appeals.

• Left Behind was published on Sunday, August 13th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Travel category.
• There have been six replies.