[endofcapital]

The web is what I know well, this may not be true in other areas, but the W3C has a long history of being hostile to end users, ignoring privacy, and pushing corporate interests over others.

Following their recommendations and doing things just because they were in the spec does make those decisions ethical or even legal. Developers have an obligation to push back against standards boards and corporations that make bad decisions.

Hiding behind the business rules or the standards committee is completely unacceptable anymore. Especially when it comes to bad security/privacy practices that generally favor a market over an end user.

[neilv]

The W3C staff I've talked with seem very decent, in a public-interest kind of way. Though there's always been a tendency of Web standards (de facto, and de jure) to serve the interests of dotcoms, a bit like an industry consortium.

I think that industry-savvy people used to be mainly concerned with avoiding abusive monopolies, since we had examples of that. What I think many early Internet and Web people (who tended to be altruistic) didn't anticipate was the current culture of pervasive sneaky privacy abuses and often questionable engineering.

[kllrnohj]

> Following [the W3C] recommendations and doing things just because they were in the spec does make those decisions ethical or even legal.

The spec being followed here is Freedesktop's, not W3C's https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/CommonExtendedAttributes/

> user.xdg.origin.url: Set on a file downloaded from a url. Its value should equal the url it was downloaded from.