Open Committee

Nevermind Netflix, the best drama shows these days are on the W3C mail ists. Recent episodes of www-style are gems, where characters like Maciej (Apple), Tab (Google), and Boris battle over the evolution of CSS, with Apple backing Adobe’s proposed Regions, and Google pushing aggressively for Shadow DOM.

Though heated at times, these arguments are between geeks in close communities with shared passions. They often reference conversations that have taken place at a pub during conferences. So sometimes an inside joke is referenced, such as when WebKit trimmed some old code and poked fun at Google’s weird PR about slimming down WebKit cruft after the Blink fork (a long-running joke) and their more recent “MOBILE-PERFORMANCE-OR-DIE-TRYING” mantra.

Bug trackers and version control systems generally lack <humor> tags, so industry observers see a commit message like that and go nuts imagining an escalation in tension between our modern corporate lords. Settle down, people.