What is a good standard?

An essay on W3C's design principles

Introduction

Why doesn't HTML include tags for style? Why can't you put text inside SMIL? Why doesn't CSS include commands to transform a document? Why, in short, does W3C modularize its specification and why in this particular way? This essay tries to make explicit what the developers in the various W3C working groups mean when they invoke words like efficiency, maintainability, accessibility, extensibility, learnability, simplicity, longevity, and other long words ending in -y.

Contrary to appearances, the W3C specifications are for the most part not designed for computers, but for people. You may think that <h1>, è and </ul> look ugly and unintuitive, but what would you think if they were called A378, 30C9 and 38F0 respectively? Most of the formats are in fact compromises between human-readability and computer efficiency. Some are more readable than others, because we expect more people to read them, others can be more cryptic, because "only" programmers will look at the source.

But why do we want people to read them at all? Because all our specs are incomplete. Because people, usually other people than the original developers, have to add to them. The computer will not by itself invent a new technology. Somebody will look at HTML, understand it and think of a "cool" new technology to complement it. That's how the Web (and not only the Web) progresses.

For the same reason we try to keep the specifications of reasonable size. They must describe a useful chunk of technology, but not one that is too large for an individual to understand. After all, new ideas usually come from individuals.

The most commonly heard guideline on the Web is to separate structure and style. It is what led to the separation of HTML and CSS into two individual specifications. And a good advice it was, too. But behind this rule there are the deeper reasons of maintainability, implementability, finding the right experts, and many more, as explained below.

The Web is all about helping humans communicate, but what hopefully becomes clear from this essay is that writing specs also is a form of human communication. There is one word that summarizes nearly all the fancy keywords of this essay, and that is: