OSNews

While I agree with the basis of your point, you can't ingore the fact that nearly all W3C members ARE driven by money, perhaps not the W3C organization itself. I used to work for the W3C (via the management group that ran it), and I can safely say of course money did/does have a major part to play. The participants are from companies that have their own agendas, their own products, and their own preferences - so they defend them. This is somewhat unavoidable (just like democracy being vulnerable to extremist majorities), they play the rules - well - and get their way. But I've frankly never deemed the W3C as an important group, development is progressed by the IETF, IESG, IRTF, IAB, ISOC, etc.. To me, the W3C is simply the 'corporate face' of internet development, and little more. Just another place to use buzzwords and explain them to CEO's...

..and the meetings were soooooo boring. The IETF was MUCH more interesting, with many attendees/members who participate without corporate backing. It was a place where you NEVER heard the word 'shareholder', at least not back then (1999).

It's hard to say we can blame any one group for the majority of this mess (aside from MS, of course ), but as standards groups have no 'enforcement' to speak of - perhaps we can only blame ourselves for choosing particular proprietary software. I blame myself for caring what a webpage looks like in IE because if I focused on Netscape/Moz/et al, I could force the user to try a _BETTER_ browser and not just the crappy one they use by default. Or perhaps they would just go to a different webpage... there's the conundrum.