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W3C
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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
- Has a Process that encourages bad testing: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.platform/BnY1261cNJo/ItsnSsi36QQJ
- 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).