Today was unremarkable save that I had an enjoyable lunch with Kynn at local Pizza joint Filippis’s Pizza Grotto. There is no electronic substitute for good company, conversation, and food.
There are not many people on the planet who I can keep up with and can keep up with me while: eating antipasto and pizza; talking about Justice League, the W3C, section 508, CSS, web accessibility, the Web Standards Project, mailing lists, web.archive.org, DeCSS, Jakob Nielsen, Apple Industrial Design and Anime. Kynn took the train down (he lives north quite a few miles) and used the excuse that he could get some writing done on the train.
Entirely stimulating, and a very long lunch. Thankfully, I have a flexible employer.
I think the neatest thing about today’s lunch is that I realized something core about what’s going on today. That the September 11th events have brought in many web geeks a desire to do something more — to work towards projects and things which matter in ways that maybe can’t be expressed as part of a stock portfolio or balance sheet. I had not put it into words that way, but Kynn’s right. More of my friends and acquaintances who do web work are thinking of it in very different terms.
The other thing that I realized is that The Web Standards Project has not by any stretch fulfilled it’s mission. Kynn made me understand even clearer that the W3C’s role is really as a technical standards body. The W3C’s role is not and never has been one of advocacy. They merely write up “Recommendations.” Well dammit, there’s a need for Advocacy out there, and that’s the reason the The Web Standards Project was born in the first place – to interact with developers, user agent creators, authoring tool vendors – everyone who uses web standards.
Along the same lines, this is interesting: There is no grassroots organization taking up the issue of Web Accessibility as something to fight for, and something to evangelize on. There are folks doing lobbying, and writing law, but there’s no independent group serving an advocacy role for web accessibility.
I love passionate groups of people banding together. I’d like to see something more in this area.
Much food for thought for me.
And the pizza was good too.
