FBML (Facebook Markup Language) and the W3C

I just typed social markup language on Google and I got this. Excellent. So what's the point here? The point is, rather surprisingly, that the W3C is actually ignoring the social network phenomenon or, more explicitly, neglecting the actual needs of web users and developers. There's no SNML (Social Network Markup Language) standardized in any W3C specification. Too bad. So the W3C seems not to care very much about what is become a de facto standard of many web platforms. It seems to delegate to specific social network owners the task of creating a common set of tags to handle their documents. But this is exactly what happened a long time ago before the creation of the W3C itself, that is, the proliferation of proprietary and not-interoperable tags in the HTML. So what? The W3C should get more interested in the real web, now and not in a remote and distant future. The alternative is simply a jump back to the age of incompatible markup and the resulting chaos of platform wars.

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