Carefully Innovating the Web
Today, in a blog post titled Reinventing HTML, Tim Berners Lee, Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (aka, the W3C), announces plans to charter a completely new working group to embark on incremental improvements to HTML, the language of the web.
As the original creator of HTML, he has led the effort at the W3C to develop new standards and improve existing standards for authoring the web as we know it.
While it may not sound like a terribly innovative project, as it speaks of "incremental improvement" to HTML, the challenges lie in adding capability to HTML, while allowing the hundreds of millions of existing web pages to continue to operate properly.
As he puts it in the blog post:
"This is going to be hard work. I'd like everyone to go into this realizing this. I'll be asking these groups to be very accountable, to have powerful issue tracking systems on the w3.org web site, and to be responsive in spirit as well as in letter to public comments. As always, we will be insisting on working implementations and test suites. Now we are going to be asking for things like talking with validator developers, maybe providing validator modules and validator test suites. (That's like a language test suite but backwards, in a way). I'm going to ask commenters to be respectful of the groups, as always. Try to check whether the comment has been made before, suggest alternative text, one item per message, etc, and add to technical perception social awareness.
This is going to be a very major collaboration on a very important spec, one of the crown jewels of web technology. Even though hundreds of people will be involved, we are evolving the technology which millions going on billions will use in the future. There won't seem like enough thankyous to go around some days. But we will be maintaining something very important and creating something even better."
This will prove to be among the most challenging collaborative efforts ever undertaken by such a large group of vital constituents. I wish them all the best and it will be fascinating to see what the next wave of the web will come to be.