I stepped down from the round table

The fictional round table from the Arthurian legend of the Middle Ages is the locus where King Arthur gathered the Fellowship that ensured the peace of his Kingdom. The table was round as a symbol of the equality of its members who included royalty as well as nobles of less importance.

The World Wide Web Consortium is hardly a Kingdom but I can’t help to draw a parallel between the W3C management group and the Round Table!

Historical background

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, founded W3C to coordinate Web standards development at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1994, and as soon as possible (which was 6 months after) added Inria (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique) as the first European W3C host in 1995 (replaced in 2003 by ERCIM), followed by Keio University of Japan in 1996, and finally Beihang University in China in 2013.

For the first 28 years of the Consortium, these four Hosts partnered administratively to manage W3C Members (invoicing and collection) and to provide employment of the global W3C staff working under the direction of W3C’s management (W3M). W3M’s composition, which is rather stable, is thus based on the people in position of leadership at the Hosts. At times where a particular geography was insufficiently represented, we’ve increased representation for that geography.

2023: a new order

Fast forward to January 2023 when W3C became its own legal entity by moving to a public-interest non-profit organization and continues the same standard development process as one single corporation, and three of the Hosts became Partners. The authority, legal obligations and fiduciary responsibility are with the corporation.

A few months before the transition, the CEO we had had for twelve years retired, having successfully set enough things in motion for the Consortium to become incorporated. At this point, our COO became the interim CEO and finalized everything, put out the fires, set up the things that were required for the new corporation, and relied heavily on the rest of the W3C Team for maintaining our activities.

The W3M round table

I draw a parallel with King Arthur’s round table because his gesture was a federating one, and his goal was to rule the kingdom with all of its stake-holders. The W3C Management team (W3M) today continues with the same assortment of people from our global distributed team, some of whom are no longer managers, and some of whom are not involved anymore in any W3C Team work.

Redesigning it

One of the side projects I undertook last year was to propose a new internal organization, that I called “the Houses model”. It aimed to (1) merge the related functions to achieve a coherent, manageable and meaningful operating model, (2) remove “split” staff where possible, in order to gain in efficiency and coordination, and (3) attempt to fix the known negative optic that 25% of the W3C team (yes! incredible!) were on W3M, by streamlining it.

It took me a month to design it, socialize it with key people, make further adjustments, and put it to W3M’s vote. The resolution passed (yeah!) but it was the (then) CEO’s opinion that the consortium could not withstand an internal reorganization before the transition (meh!).

Objecting and finally leaving the round table

Starting before the W3C Inc. transition, W3M activities, which were to continue unchanged, slowed down rather abruptly and gradually came to a halt. W3Mers held their honorary positions while fewer matters were discussed and the group met less and less frequently, ultimately to deal asynchronously with scraps only.

I understand the inherent inertia of big groups. I recognize the allure of expediting decision-making where there is too many pressing matters and not enough time. But I thought that a temporary structure to allow leadership with transparency could have been set up, and some of the frustration could have been prevented. Not by scrambling to implement the Houses model we had decided to adopt. But with due diligence and open dialogue so that everyone understood the need for extraordinary measures.

For about a year, the status quo did not sit well with me (and I let the group know, early and often) because the opacity was not fair to the [rest of the] group itself, but also to the W3C Team and W3C Members whose expectations remained that decisions were the consensus of W3M, when it was no longer the case. I had concerns about the risk of taking insufficiently informed decisions or uninformed decisions. I had a strong discomfort with being personally associated with any decision that I actually hardly contributed to, if at all. So I asked to step down from the management group a few weeks ago and today I did.

I continue as Head of the W3C Communications team and have enough on my plate to keep me busy. I would be happy to consider rejoining the W3C Management team in the future, but as I do not care about a honorary position, it would have to be for meaningful contributions again.

December update: In the meantime, W3C hired a new CEO, who after a few weeks was ready to reconvene the management team. I was invited rather organically.

How I made the Firefox “reader view” popin NOT overlap text

I ❤️ the Firefox feature called Reader View. I’ve been a fan for many years and I use it often. A lot of the time, I click the “listen” button, and I read while the text is being read to me.

BUT, if you leave the popin (clicking it a second time shelves it back) in order to use the pause/skip/speed buttons and slider while you read along, it blocks some of the text as the text automatically scrolls. See what I mean:

Screenshot of a browser page on desktop in reader view with the 'listen' popin showing pause/skip/speed buttons and slider that blocks some of the text from the page.

Because there’s a lot of empty space on the left side in reader view, I thought it should be possible to get the popup to be drawn over the empty space on the other side rather than overlapping the text.

I initially applied this:

** for the "reader view" popup to NOT overlap the text **/
.dropdown .dropdown-popup {
inset-inline-start: -260px !important;
}

Then, my colleague Bert Bos (who knows a thing or two about CSS because he co-invented it with Håkon Lie) advised me to use the below, for the toolbar to stay at the left margin, and as long as that margin is wider than the popup, it will not overlap the text.


/* Put the toolbar in the reader view as far left as possible. */
#toolbar.toolbar-container .toolbar.reader-toolbar {
margin-inline-start: 1px !important;
}

I’m much happier now; this is how it looks:

Screenshot a browser page on desktop in reader view with the 'listen' popin showing pause/skip/speed buttons and slider at the left of the page, thus no longer blocking any of the text from the page.

Add a user stylesheet

  • In the Firefox address bar, type 'about:profiles' and click the button “Show in Finder” (or similar if not on Mac OS) next to “Local Directory”
  • Open the “chrome” directory (or create it if it does not exist)
  • Edit the file 'userContent.css' (or create it if it does not exist)
  • Paste the custom snippet and save the file:
    /** Put the toolbar in the reader view as far left as possible. **/
    .dropdown .dropdown-popup {
    inset-inline-start: -260px !important;
    }
  • In the Firefox address bar, type 'about:config' and set 'toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets' to true
  • Open the menu Tools > Browser Tools > Web Developer Tools
  • Click the three-dot menu, and choose “Settings”. Under “Inspector”, check the “Show Browser Styles” checkbox
  • Restart Firefox
  • Enjoy!

Vote it up as an idea in Mozilla Connect

I put it on the Mozilla Idea Exchange and if you think this change should be the default, please vote it up!

12 months of biking

Today marks 12 months of e-road cycling and e-mountain biking for me! and tomorrow will mark 12 months since I got my own eMTB (pictured below).

Dark grey electric mountain bike propped against a tree in the forest
Nakamura e-summit 950

3011 kilometers, shown in orange on the SportsTracker map!

Map of the area showing in various shades of orange the area I have covered on my eMTB. It goes as far as Fréjus and Roquebrune in the Var at the West, Mons, Caussols and Gréolières at the North and Saint-Laurent du Var at the East.
Map of the area showing in various shades of orange the area I have covered on my eMTB. It goes as far as Fréjus and Roquebrune in the Var at the West, Mons, Caussols and Gréolières at the North and Saint-Laurent du Var at the East.

Most of it was recreational but a lot of it was a substitute to driving for errands and commute, or to meet people.

I think (*) I have driven fewer kilometers than I cycled in the last year, as a result.

I enjoy myself biking way more than anything else. I’m not very good at it but I don’t care. I’m not very bad at it either!

Biking makes me happy and I look happy on a bike. I selected from the last 12 months a few pictures of me (taken mostly by my co-biker, former colleague and friend Daniel) that I like in particular.


(*) estimate of 2700-2900 km driven.

Book: “Parable of the Sower” by Octavia E. Butler

★★★✩✩

Cover of the book. The illustration shows a black woman in vivid pink and orange dress and head dress walking.

(From the back of the book) We are coming apart. We’re a rope, breaking, a single strand at a time.
America is a place of chaos, where violence rules and only the rich and powerful are safe. Lauren Olamina, a young woman with the extraordinary power to feel the pain of others as her own, records everything she sees of this broken world in her journal.
Then, one terrible night, everything alters beyond recognition, and Lauren must make her voice heard for the sake of those she loves.
Soon, her vision becomes reality and her dreams of a better way to live gain the power to change humanity forever.

I gave this book 3/5 ⭐️ because it’s a dystopian novel about the future, written in the past, where that future is horribly plausible and is already happening. Also because it’s a story about strong people of color, strong women, human rights, climate change, greed of the wealthy who treat people like a commodity, and hope in mutual help and good sense.

It took me over three months to finish the book. I went weeks without reading it. I hope to get a sense of closure and that the series makes sense, by reading “Parable of the talents” which continues the heroine’s story.

I found the climate change dystopian context riveting (the story, written in 1993, takes place in 2024-2027.)

I did not care for the religious or philosophical aspect of the novel which I found unconvincing and I was surprised and disappointed how little resistance the heroine encounters as she assembles a following to create this religious or philosophical community. 

I was disappointed that I found so little character development. That so many things are painstakingly detailed while others are glossed over. It gave me a fuzzy and partial visualization interspersed with very precise events narration. I would have liked more balance.

I think the author made the right choice to write this as a diary. It makes the shortcomings a little less worse. It also allows the young (15-18 year old) protagonist to boast, be a bit smug, and quite manipulative. I still found it hard to believe that however cunning and smart she is, she is met with hardly any resistance from her fellow travelers.