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Comment by gsnedders | Hacker News Reader

> You have more of a voice in the W3C than any other standards body (you can comment on the github issues, or join as an invited expert etc).

That's… not any different to the WHATWG. You can comment on GitHub issues there just fine too. (And you can't just join as an invited expert for the W3C, but even being an invited expert means relatively little in most groups.)

> The W3C was created by Tim Berners-Lee, if anyone should have a vote on how web standards are run, then the creator of the web should be one of the contenders for it.

Tim is scarcely involved in the W3C nowadays, and hasn't been for a long time. The fact he's in theory the Director (but in practice almost everything is done by W3C staff in the Director's name) means very, very little.

That's an appeal to an authority who isn't even present.

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>You can comment on GitHub issues there just fine too.

Yes, but (and you can disagree with me here) the W3C has much better international participation and say in standards. I know you can just file github comments, but none of the world has any real way to oppose any development that the whatwg makers have proposed. There doesn't seem to be any consensus forming or way to really oppose any development apart from filing a github issue. All the editors are pretty much from one company, which feels like handing over control of the web to that one company essentially.

> All the editors are pretty much from one company, which feels like handing over control of the web to that one company essentially.

Which company are you referring to? Per https://github.com/whatwg/sg/blob/master/Workstreams.md, I see

- 3 independent (Dom Farolino, Robert Kowalski, G. P. Hemsley)

- 2 Mozilla (Mike Taylor, Anne van Kesteren)

- 2 Google (Domenic Denicola, Philip Jägenstedt)

- 1 CloudFlare (Terrin Stock)

- 1 Bocoup (Simon Pieters)

Okay, so they have added more people there than the last time I looked (which was pretty much all google except for 1 mozilla person). Thanks for pointing towards that link.

Still seems a pretty small group to control something so important, but I hope they keep improving and adding more people there from other companies and countries.

The main restriction here is people willing to volunteer. We have tons of specs desperate for more maintenance work. If you'd like to get involved, please do so, and if you can spend significant amount of time on any of them, I imagine their current editors would be happy to add you to the team. (I certainly would, for the specs I edit.) You can get started at https://github.com/search?q=is%3Aopen+label%3A%22good+first+....

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