Making W3C the Place for New Standards - The Survey!
Author(s) and publish date
- By:
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Ian Jacobs
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- Published:
Before taking a short vacation starting last week I announced a public survey: Making W3C the place for new Web standards. The survey is part of the work of the task force I'm chairing that has a number of goals:
- Make W3C an attractive venue for developing Web technology.
- Make it extremely easy for individuals (not just organizations) to participate actively in the W3C community.
- Create a smooth path from "new idea" to "standard", while not expecting or requiring all products to use all mechanisms.
- Promote outreach to communities not yet connected to W3C to learn from them and encourage them to bring new ideas to W3C.
The survey is part of our initial data-gathering effort. In this first phase of our work, we want to identify perceived and real barriers to participation, the W3C value proposition to audiences interested in bringing new work to W3C, and some use cases we should be sure to address (or, if we don't, at least document while prioritizing).
We are doing this work in public (see the wiki and mailing list). We are having a lot of conversations with people to flesh out the use cases, list of barriers, etc. so that in the next phase, we draft proposals that have a chance of meeting real needs. We are starting to write down ideas and proposals but they are very drafty at this point, as well as incomplete. Our aim is to come up with proposals that address use cases, lower barriers to participation, and enhance the W3C value proposition. I expect to provide periodic updates via this W3C blog between now and November, when we present our proposals to the W3C Membership.
In the meantime, there are already 67 responses to the survey, lots more than I expected to find right after vacation. If you have stories to share with W3C that you think will help us improve the organization, please take a moment to take the survey. Thanks!
I have a suggestion on improving the W3C standard UI-Markup languages.
Purpose:
We have numerous types of server side languages such as Java,PHP,ASP.net,Ruby on Rails etc. Assuming that a project was being developed using ASP.net-MVC as the server side language and management decides to shift to PHP to reduce the server cost or just because their new developers are clever in PHP but not good in ASP.net.
Then the front-end developers need to replace all the asp.net-mvc scriptlets with PHP scriptlets and they also have to change all the data-table collections iterations etc.
So I believe that we really need those nice things in the future,which XSLT uses to read an XML and iterate data collections and displays nicely etc. Because XML is a universal language and if the front end developer just needs to deal with XML instead of any other server side language, it will be great as anyone can shift the server side at their will and generate just XML, that the front end developer has to use.
Sugession:
I would like to suggest the W3C, which rules the web to develop a standard mark up for dynamic pages, which needs only an XML string to make the dynamic changes on a web page. Make it a universal standard and discourage the use of the browsers which are unable to adopt the w3c standards(which give a big pain for designers/developers)
After w3c introduced this server side language independent dynamic markup, the designers and front end developers do not need to worry about any server side language. As an example,
"An individual develops an application with PHP, and after a company needs his application but they need to use java as the server side language. But this UI-Dynamic markup deals only with XML the view pages can be left as they are, and developer just needs to do the server side coding so that his new server side language generates the same XML that his view pages use as data templates."
So it will be great if W3C can introduce such a dynamic markup to the web.
Thanks!
"Victory is nothing but the Consistency!"
@Chathura Asanga Kulasinghe
As a fellow web developer, I see the point you're making, but that's probably a little too much to ask, because both PHP and ASP.NET are turing complete programming languages (well... platform in the case of ASP.NET) that have a much more direct access to their respective environments than what a standardized language would have.
Having said that, have you seen W3C's recent XProc specification? It's the closest thing to what you're asking for - standard process description language for XML based languages, written in XML itself, extensible by several points (attributes, steps, options, extra ports...) that are to be implemented in the host environment or the language itself.
I can imagine a point in the future where the de facto standard will be the HTTP request appearing on the pipeline's source port, and the HTTP response appearing on the result port... currently, the only problem is lack of such implementations... well... any non JAVA implementations to be more precise.