W3C

Some issues with the W3C. Not really exhaustive.

• Restrictive copyright
• Forks rather than cooperates
• Main publications on TR/ are stale and cause confusion
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=688878#c6
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=505115#c141
  • http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webapps/2012JanMar/1207.html
  • https://critic.hoppipolla.co.uk/showcomment?chain=1232
  • http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-w3process/2014Sep/0081.html
  • ?? many versions of canvas
• CSS modularization (When designing the Fullscreen/<dialog> stacking model, the lack of a living standard spec for CSS that represented the current cutting edge status meant that features of CSS that were may have been overridden by one spec (e.g. CSS regions) were used by the proposal, without the implications being understood. (Specifically, it was suggested that CSS regions redefined how the containing block mechanism works; in general, without knowing what all the relevant specs are, there is no way to be sure that no other spec does in fact modify some underlying concept.))

Extracts from e-mails

In this section, some complaints about the W3C have been collected.

Canvas spec woes

This is an extract of an e-mail sent in the context of complaining about the W3C forking the 2D Canvas part of the HTML spec. The observation was that while the fork of the WHATWG version meant the W3C was publishing one redundant copy, the situation just within the W3C was actually a lot worse:

Here's the list of all the 2D Context API specs I could find at the
W3C as of March 4th 2014:

• http://dev.w3.org/2006/canvas-api/canvas-2d-api.html
• http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-html5-20080122/#the-2d
• http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-html5-20080610/the-canvas.html#the-2d
• http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-html5-20090212/the-canvas-element.html#the-2d-context
• http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-html5-20090423/the-canvas-element.html#the-2d-context
• http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-html5-20090825/the-canvas-element.html#the-2d-context
• http://www.w3.org/TR/2010/WD-2dcontext-20100304/
• http://www.w3.org/TR/2010/WD-2dcontext-20100624/
• http://www.w3.org/TR/2010/WD-2dcontext-20101019/
• http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-2dcontext-20110113/
• http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-2dcontext-20110405/
• http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-2dcontext-20110525/
• http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/CR-2dcontext-20121217/
• http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/WD-2dcontext-20120329/
• http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/WD-2dcontext-20121025/
• http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/WD-2dcontext2-20121217/
• http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/CR-2dcontext-20130806/
• http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/WD-2dcontext2-20130528/
• http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/WD-2dcontext2-20131029/
• http://dev.w3.org/html5/canvas-extensions/
• http://dev.w3.org/html5/2dcontext-LC/
• http://dev.w3.org/html5/2dcontext/
• http://www.w3.org/TR/2dcontext/
• http://www.w3.org/TR/2dcontext2/
• http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/2dcontext/html5_canvas/
• http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/2dcontext/html5_canvas_CR/
• http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/2dcontext/master/

Note that the first one has "2006" in the URL, is undated, says
copyright "2004", and references a draft from 2009. So the dates in
the URLs aren't very useful in determining whether they're up to date
or not. Then, notice the bottom seven, all of which seem to have some
claim to being the "latest" version. Four of them are dated March 4th
2014 (today)!

I actually couldn't tell you which version an implementor should look
at to get the latest information if they wanted a W3C reference. They
contradict each other (e.g. different methods are differently named
even amongst the various editors' drafts -- and that's not even
comparing them to the WHATWG spec, it's the W3C specs that contradict
each other here). Also, they all seem to be missing cross-references
to key terms (e.g. what does "fully decodable" mean? It's underlined,
indicating it's a link, but it isn't actually a link).