The W3C seems to be too weighted down with bureaucracy and special interests to be useful any more.
The web is basically run on HTML 4, XHTML 1, CSS 2... none of which have had any significant update in years and years.
The W3Cs lack of urgency will quickly make them irrelevant. If you take a step back and look at the current standards you'll quickly realize that (X)HTML are too basic and CSS is quite convoluted...(I mean come on... margin: auto; to center something? Float, relative, absolute positioning... completely unintuitive! Then they tell you not to use XHTML tables for positioning and then turn around and put the table concept into CSS!!!)
The market won't wait for these sloths. Microsoft is coming out with Silverlight, Sun is coming out with JavaFX, and adobe is coming out with AIR. This will be the future of the web and it is gearing up to make the Netscape vs Internet Explorer wars look like kids play.... we shall see if any of the W3C standards live through that war.
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