Exactly! It's a very cynical view of the media and unfortunately one I encounter too often among tech vendors. This statement makes everything else seem like sour grapes, regardless of the facts of the matter.
205 karma · joined January 22, 2010
When dealing with something like health insurance data (or really any service, to be honest) I like to know there's a human or corporation behind it. Your contact page just lists an anonymous email address.
Knowing who the team are that built this thing would give some assurance — particularly because your signup page asks quite a lot of information, way more than you give away about yourselves.
Yes, the W3C process takes about half the lifespan of many HN readers. Yup, it's not ideal.
But it's the only game in town and it's been going on so long because it works. Because it successfully brought Microsoft into the fold and conversation at a time where, had they decided, they could have broken everything.
It's worth exercising a little perspective. Can you think of any endeavor that has so successfully united vendors to create something as broad and interoperable as the web, over such a relatively small period of history? The W3C has been fundamental to this.
- What has the W3C ever done for us?
-- Well, HTML.
- Oh yeah, they gave us that. Yeah. That's true.
-- And CSS you could view source and copy.
--- Yeah, you remember how scared we all were of Microsoft Blackbird?
- All right, I'll grant you that HTML and CSS are two things the W3C have done...
(you get the idea.)
To me, that's the biggest challenge in an open interoperable social layer: preserving a good user experience.
That work derived from that of Charles Goldfarb on SGML, dating from 1989 on ESIS, ISO 8879.
We'll always be downsampling to something we can use with sed, grep and awk. They're too handy not to.