Hacker News Reader

I don't know the reasons that the W3C state, but I can see a reason for making some amount of the process behind closed doors: the 802.11 'pre-n' debacle. Vendors taking incomplete standards and running with them before they are mature enough to use. Of course there is also the opposite danger: vendors implementing their own 'standards' because the standards body is taking too long behind closed doors.

View on HN

The implementors _are_ the working group. Standards organisations don't make up standards without the implementors. :-) (At least, not successfully. Some do try.)

Secret working groups aren't secret from the participants, so it wouldn't make any difference to the case you describe. Indeed, the 802.11 working group _does_ work in secret, yet still had the "debacle" you mention. (The IEEE as a whole is not a very open standards organisation.)

Also, hardware standards are a bit more difficult, but in software, you really want to have experimental implementations long before standardisation. Otherwise, you end up with technologies that really don't work so well in practice. But that's separate from the issue of secrecy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com