Tomorrow marks ten years since the founding of the World Wide Web Consortium. And just as a ten-year-old child will tend not to keep silent about its wishes for a party and its particular desires for presents, so the W3C has put some early effort into ensuring it gets a decent pile of birthday wishes. It has kindly provided an interactive message board for the purpose. And of course the messages have come in from all over the web. One says, "Boldog Születésnapot!", which may sound like the kind of rebuke you might hurl at a misbehaving hound, but is actually Hungarian for Happy Birthday. Sneak was slightly disappointed by one aspect of the online birthday card, however. Sneak knows about all the problems with spammers and pornographers, but really... The fact that the W3C, of all organisations, won't allow messages with web-links says all anyone needs to know about the current state of the web.

30 Nov 2004