a letter to tim berners lee

well as sugested i emailed someone from the w3c and there was a wide variety to choose from but i decided that the best person to email was tim as he founded the w3c and would be the best person to answer my question the email in which i sent him is as follows.

hello i am writing to you because i have a question that ive always wondered about the w3c.

Please understand that although it may come across as criticism I do not intend it to be as such.

What I have been wondering is its long been my understanding that the w3c is the governing body of web standards and you set in place standards and specifications for not only the html language but also the css language, But it is common knowledge to many that when creating a website that you may have to do certain things to make them work in other browsers why is this?

Sureley if there is a specification in place then everyone should have uniformity in the way they display the same piece of content. things like font spacing and default margins i can understand to a degree may be different but often the differences go way beyond that when you compare a design across various browsers and some companies even seem to go as far as to completely throw the specification out of the window some notable examples being Mozilla moz prefix tags like moz-border-radius and googles web-kit prefix which while prefixing is understandable for things that are special to the browser it makes little sense to me why or more importantly how they can do this when there's clearly a standard which they should be fulfilling.

So id like to know what is it that the w3c is responsible for and what is the response to various developer houses not following the standards which have been set in place. sureley the web could become a much richer and more interactive place if developers could spend less time hacking designs to suit various browsers and worrying about cross compatibility and more time creating new and better ways to bring content to there audiences.

i thank you in advance for taking the time to read this email and eagerley await your response this this long wondered question of mine yours sincerley

kyle rees humble web design student

i will keep you posted with any responses that i get although i do imagine hes a busy man.