Browser vendors should not be allowed membership in the CSS Working Group?
With the recent Opera vs Microsoft fisco (short story: Opera filed an antitrust case vs Microsoft for monopolizing the browser market and not supporting web standards), members of the CSS Working Group such as Andy Clarke have begun suggesting that the group disband and reform anew.
He suggests that having members who are at the same time on the payroll of browser vendors compromises the group’s integrity and endangers the future of CSS and CSS3. Moreover, the gives a shocking insight that CSS standards were not arrived at through “a collaborative, non-partisan process” that eventually were made “available for browser makers to implement (or not) as they chose” but rather it was the opposite — that standards relied heavily on browser support — as it was in the case of CSS2.1.
Andy calls into question the decision of CWG member and Opera CTO Håkon Wium Lie to support the Opera vs Microsoft case, saying that it
… calls into question whether or not their representatives can, or are allowed by their employers to work together with their competitors in a spirit of cooperation. It calls into question the fundamental basis on which the CSS Working Group has operated up until this point …
He concludes by suggesting that “Opera’s action now makes the CSS Working Group unworkable and that immediate and sweeping changes are necessary.”
