I have finished my first assignment in IT 🎉. Technically, only because it is my first assignment submitted, not given. But in the past week lots of things have been learned, this includes how much W3C has impacted how the web works and is run. That is because of how many things the W3C manages, they don’t just do HTML, they basically control most aspects of the internet. This is also my last week left (of term 1) before holidays, so even more yay.

There have been lots of impacts of the W3C, most of them are positive impacts luckily. They have made developers life easier compared to when there were no regulations. That is because they didn’t have to spend time testing on other browser standards. That is also good for the end user, they can enjoy the website will in most platforms. “As far as users are concerned, one of the biggest benefits to them is the predictability of the web.” [link].

Unfortunately, they also have negative impacts; an example is the innovation slacking because it is hard to try to add new features to an old spec. That could be why there is an increasing number of proprietary functions. This is not that good for the user consuming the website because if they use a website that is trying to do something but only available for one browser, the user is left with nothing when not using that browser.

Some things that I have learned is that W3C is very useful but has issues/reasons that it is and isn’t that good. A big reason is that it is old, lots of the standards are made of back years ago, and the website itself is just very unmodern in its looks, they also don’t even make sure they follow their own specs (see link). We didn’t really have many activities in-class that could have helped learning, but just the fact that the teacher was there to ask questions was helpful. I could (and did) ask about my paragraphs on my report(s), my ideas to write, and other unrelated questions (that wasn’t that useful tho). My next steps are to finish the task (I say that as writing before assignment is due), learn from my mistakes in next similar assignment (probably next semester), and enjoy the holidays. I could also reflect on my work, and how I didn’t do it the best, including starting it earlier and not getting distracted (and also getting people). The purpose of the task is quite simple, make us learn about the W3C so when actually making websites, can make them follow the specs (WCAG and Web standards). It is also just because the curriculum requires a research task, but it isn’t that bad, only writing and actually doing it is tedious.

TL;DR: I finished the assignment, and found out how much of a necessity W3C is. And exited for holidays.