Overall the World Wide Web Consortium isn’t doing to badly, but they have several working groups that have adopted a model for their projects that kills the technology.
The latest such group is the CSS3 working group.
They did the same model for CSS3 as the XHTML group did for XHTML 1.1, they broke the specification into smaller documents.
If someone is wanting to use XHTML 1.1 for a website, they have to include multiple DTD lines to gain the functionality they require to display the pages they need for the website. Way to much effort when you can just use 1 DTD in XHTML 1.0
Now, the website developer wants to use CSS3 in their website(s). uh-oh, it’s not a single document to learn the specification, it’s 20+ documents, each only about a small part of the specification. You want to use a table, that’s one set of documents.
you want to use boxes, that’s a different set of documents.
you want to use images, another set of documents …
Why is the W3C so in love with driving people into IGNORING their work that they have to make it HARDER for people to get the information from it?
[ NOTE: the HTML5 working group have not adopted this idiotic model, they are making it available as a single document / set of documents ]
The other big thing that is hurting the W3C is the changes to their website. They broke all their projects into different groupings, and ONLY link to these groupings from the main page. This wouldn’t be so bad, [b][i]if they bothered to detail what each grouping contained [/i][/b] instead of assuming that every single person is going to know the grouping intuitively. I literally had to contact their webmaster to FIND the HTML5 working draft. The grouping does not make any sense to me and I doubt that I am the only person with that issue.
I bet their new website design was described in the requirements as “intuitive”. The absolute WORST descriptor possible, because of the FACT that people do not all think or work the same.
