On Jul 8, 2004, at 10:00 AM, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:

> it may be time to "send in
> the clowns".

To be fair, the W3C started out as a Clown Collective that swept up 
after the mess that the various browsers were creating and attempted to 
herd the elephants in the same direction.  At some point they 
apparently decided that this task was too dirty and smelly and left it 
to WS-I, WHAT, et al., and aspired to the position of ringmaster (or 
whoever it is that traditionally leads the circus parade).

In other words, the responses to my original query make it clear to me 
that the W3C has stopped doing what it used to do that made it an 
invaluable forum during the browser wars. Now that the browser wars are 
starting to be less of a one-sided slaughter, the W3C has "other 
priorities" (as Dick Cheney would say).

To be even more fair, a lot of this is because the "elephants" won't 
follow the W3C's lead, e.g. with XHTML, SVG, XForms, etc.  It's at 
least open to debate whether the role of a leader is to keep pressing 
on and figure that the herd will catch up when they realize that the 
direction was right after all, or whether the leader should go back to 
simply trying to keep the elephants bunched up and moving in more or 
less the same direction.