Jason Liu's Personal Website

For those of you who aren't Web designers who happen to be familiar with Web standards, accessibility, usability, and all that jazz, Jeffrey Zeldman is generally considered the Godfather of the Web standards movement. In his 2006 July 17th blog entry, he reported how yet another brilliant mind at the W3C has left the organization. (Well, not exactly. More on this later.) This time, it is Björn Hörmann, and Zeldman's entry points to a (rather long) message by Hörmann detailing his reasons for leaving the W3C QA Group that was posted on 2006 July 16th. And when Grandpappy Zeldman himself states that, "I worry about the direction in which the W3C is headed," something is definitely wrong. This is because Jeffrey is generally known to be fairly measured in his words, and usually tries to avoid seeming alarmist or excessively whiny.

Addressing my parenthetical statement from earlier, it was pointed out in a post this morning by one of the chairs of the W3C QA Group entitled A Peaceful Ear to the QA Group's blog that Hörmann wasn't quitting the W3C entirely, just leaving the QA Group. That's all fine and good, but Zeldman's original point was that it is becoming clear that there is a gap between the people designing the next-generation Web standards at the W3C and the Web designers and developers who will eventually be the ones implementing them. As someone in the latter group who has been an ardent supporter of designing with Web standards, I would have to concur with Jeffrey's view, especially from what I have seen so far of the latest Working Drafts of the 2.0 versions of the XHTML and WCAG specifications. I guess we'll just have to wait and see what happens in the near future.