gadfly> jean-christophe helary wrote:
>>
>> well, i don't know berners-lee personally and i am not a
>> technician, but it seems that he is the man who is keeping all
>> that together and who made web standarts what they are today,
>> probably not in the technical sense but definitely in the
>> political sense. and he definitely has a vision. all the major
>> browser makers are now struggling to comply to w3c standarts (as
>> well as influencing the standarts to fit their platforms). no
>> need for 'great technical accomplishments' to make things happen.
>>
gadfly> i dont question the value of the results you list. i am just
gadfly> not convinced tim-berners lee is the significant cause of
gadfly> them. the idea of standards based open technology is sort of
gadfly> built into the internet and standards groups such as the
gadfly> IETF and governing bodies like IESG or W3C are a logical
gadfly> outgrowth of that philosophy. i agree that w3c needs a
gadfly> leader and berners-lee is that leader and he does a good
gadfly> job.
Well, sorta.
I think he's a bit overrated. The W3C has recently conceded to reality by forming an all-star body, the Technical Architecture Group, in a concession that Berners-Lee cannot by himself sufficiently monitor and integrate everything the W3C is doing such that it all works together.
The single most common complaint from developers trying to implement or use W3C standards is that many of them simply don't mesh very well together; that is, there is a lack of high-level architectural integration, which is what TAG is supposed to provide. (But it's going to bottleneck very quickly; it's already accepted a dozen or so issues for review, and it's only been meeting actively since January.)
Berners-Lee is still the institutional bigwig of this TAG group, by virtue of being the Director of W3C, but it includes 6 or 8 other very important people behind the Web's success. (I published a piece on XML.com recently that looks at the TAG and its first few efforts at high-level integration.)
However, Berners-Lee does have his own hobbyhorses, some of which W3C memmber corporations have specifically *not* funded, including most of all RDF research (RDF is the Resource Description Framework; sorta like knowledge representation for the Web, i.e., a kind of weak AI).
The other reason for forming the TAG was so that Berners-Lee could get back to 'hacking' (i.e, actually doing researcha and development work) more often, the results of which have been mostly mixed so far. He's written some pretty odd Python code to do knowledge representation inferencing stuff with RDF; code which has been slagged pretty hard by some developers. But it is fairly cutting edge for the W3C.
The issue of the intellectual property status of W3C deliverables is also a place where I think Berners-Lee has not shown strong leadership; but then again there is only so much he can do.
One interesting thing about the politics of the W3C is the degree to which really good, important work gets done by corporations who otherwise compete with each other on the implementation of that work versus how much good work gets done by independent developers, most of whom neither work for a corporation or for a university.
definitely w3c holds some influence in pushing
gadfly> standards but even there i am fairly pessimistic.
The CIOC (www.cioc.gov; the council of federal agency Chief Info Officers) just came out with a draft of Federal Guidelines for the use of XML and other Web/Internet technologies, and it's very strong pro-W3C, which sort of gives Microsoft an indirect channel of influence over federal IT expenditures, which will be around $45B this year.
if
gadfly> microsoft complies with the dictates of a standards body it
gadfly> is only so because they have not yet gained sufficient
gadfly> market share to set their own, or because they feel pressure
gadfly> from their customers.
Actually, MS is probably the biggest driver of many key W3C standards, including XML Schema (which is huge for W3C), XML Protocol (which is basically cleaning up SOAP, which is also MS's baby, more or less), and some other key stuff. That is, MS vies with Sun and IBM as the single most influential W3C member as far as creating standards.
Which is not to say it won't screw with these same standards, poorly or exclusively implement them, and do other nasty, adjudicated-monopoly kinds of things to protect and extend its market share.
gadfly> growing number of web sites that use internet explorer
gadfly> specific features (it doesnt help that explorer is turning
gadfly> out to be a better browser than its closest rival from
gadfly> netscape, however true it may be that mozilla is more
gadfly> standards compliant).
The very latest Mozilla is a *very* nice browser on Windows and on Linux (and improving rapidly on Mac OS X); the browser battle is *long* over, but Mozilla 0.9.8 is quite lovely.
Best, Kendall Clark -- I am a finite state machine.