W3C Train Wreck?

I am getting really concerned about the way web standards are going - especially HTML5 and Web Sockets:

Here: http://blogs.msdn.com/interoperability/ archive/2010/03/11/html5-microsoft-participation-in-the-w3c-html-working-group.aspx there is a post on HTML5 which is worth reading and the associated link to an interview here: http://www.w3.org/QA/2010/03/ interview_paul_cotton_on_micro.html is interesting as well. This led me to read this: http://www.w3.org/TR/html5-diff which indicates that WebSockets "have been taken out [of the HTML5 specification] and will be further developed by the Web Applications Working Group as standalone specifications." [italics my own].

Bloat, irrelevance, dilution and special interests abound! I fear the whole concept of the WWW as originally conceived is being lost as thought leadership evaporates:

In Response To The Above MSDN Blog Post, I commented Thus (I have repeated here as I don't know if the comment will be published and I felt it was relevant anyhow):

Interesting post and an interesting interview linked. However, "The Web has grown significantly over the last decade based largely on the interoperability of the W3C HTML4 Recommendation." that is a stretch IMHO. HTML4 has been important, but it seems that stuff outside the specification - like AJAX - has been more important technically. Further, a lot of web growth has actually centred around totally non HTML stuff like FLASH.

I don't think it is clear what HTML5 is even for, especially now that WebSockets have been taken out. I have a sinking feeling that HTML5 will bog down into an overweight specification which will cause an overall reduction in inter-op rather than an increase. Much as the ANSI2002 specification for COBOL did (for example).

As I said here I suspect that the age of the Web 'leaders' is an indication that the Web is loosing its energy and becoming far too bureaucratic and special interest centred. If we keep going this way, W3C will become irrelevant and the threat of commercial interests trying to gain leverage via differentiation in supported protocols will re-emerge is a more virulent form than it did even in the mid nineties.

KISS guys!

Virtual Mythology

Myth And Virtual Worlds: Are they performing the same function?

People seem to love the spirit world of myth, fairies, magic, miracles and profits. What is before our eyes never seems to be enough. Across cultures, continents and millennia, making stuff up and then believing it is one of the great unifying themes of human experience.

Over the last two centuries, and especially over the last 100 years, this most human of behaviours has suffered repeated seismic shocks from the cultural domain. The enlightenment and rise of scientific thought has threatened the very notion of making stuff up which people seem to hold so dear.

The scientific method and the philosophical notion of positivism has had a cultural impact the likes of which come only every millennium or so. We might say that the printing press was the greatest single invention of the second millennium; I would argue that "prove it by peer review" has had a more profound impact. The simple statement of "fact" by an authority figure is no longer held as sufficient. A religion like Christianity would be still born in the modern world because very few people would believe the unsupported and unsupportable statements of a single human over the collected views of the many. It is not just the received wisdom of the many, but the desire of that many to repeat observations, create and test predictions and ultimately perform a Popperian counter proof analysis which radically altered the status of the made-up from viable to whimsical.

Movements like futurology and science fiction represent an early to mid twentieth century attempt to re-assert the made-up. The thin veneer of science glued over a simplistic regurgitation of age old myths tried to give these cultural artefacts some weight beyond mere whimsy. Both efforts ultimately failed by the end of the twentieth century.

Science relies on the notion of correspondence. The underlying notion being that there is a physical reality and that people observe it. People's observations may be flawed. To project out the flaws of one or even a few humans, many humans observe and assess which results match up with one another. By looking for counter example and supporting example, over time we convert a coherent hypothesis into a correspondent theory. I.e. over time we project out as much human bias as possible and are left with a theories which should correspond to the physical reality. This is not always an easy process and humans are limited; at least the ideal exists and it is what we strive to achieve.

Futurology failed because the predictions it made did not come to pass and then moved into the ridiculous. Where are our flying cars? Science fiction failed because over time it became obvious that the stories were shallow reflections of the cultural themes prevalent at the time of writing and owed almost nothing to the scientific method. If one puts the two together, we can see that belief in a wonderful, almost magical future arrived at via technology has failed to satisfy.

If you cannot fantasise - virtualise

Given correspondence, we can no longer make stuff up and have it believed because our fantasies are soon shown to not be correspondent. In steps virtual worlds! ICT gives us the Internet with which we can create our own worlds and share them with other people. These worlds are not fantasies in the classical sense; even though we create them with our own rules, they exist. We do not have to imagine them, we create them. In virtual mythology, everyone can have a correspondent view - but it corresponds to what we make up!

Video Games Rob You Of Your Identity

An 18 year old lad said this. His observations cut to the heart of the matter. Who is creating these virtual mythologies and for the benefit of whom?