Standards development and cooking a delicious dish in the kitchen have more in common than you might think.

In a recent post, Web standards expert and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) blogger Virginie Galindo likens standards development to cooking. Galindo compares gathering feedback from web developers to “test[ing] a dish” and seeing if the audience finds it “to [their] taste.”

Galindo’s culinary metaphor is a handy one, as it uniquely captures the creative and communal aspects of standards development. At the Paris Web conference this October, Galindo will be discussing possible “recipes” for privacy and security. The conference, which will be attended by over 1,300 web professionals, will feature a variety of topics regarding open standards, but Galindo is particularly excited about the special emphasis that will be placed on privacy and security. “I will promote the recent work in Web Application Security, Web Cryptography, Privacy, together with security and privacy related activities of the Technical Architecture Group.” says Galindo. “I’ll do my best to expose the recent security and privacy achievements, ongoing plans, and developing success of W3C.”

According to Galindo’s own website, some of her expositional goals for Paris Web include the following:

  • Why security matters and how W3C progresses on that quest
  • How users could win a decent treatment of their application permission, but also better understand the danger and countermeasure of browser fingerprinting
  • How web developers could implement security policy based on crypto operations, and create mixed content with less security risk, thanks to the Web Crypto API, CORS and CSP
  • How important it is to improve user and service provider’s interest by promoting usage of HTTPS
  • How the next features of the open web platform could be made available in secured context

Of all the talking points that Galindo anticipates, none seem to be more important to her than emphasizing the collaborative nature of standards development. By getting more feedback from industry professionals and by capturing the imaginations of enthusiastic contributors, the end result is a set of standards that more fully meet the needs of the developer community.

We hope you’ll join W3C, IEEE, ISOC, IETF and IAB in becoming an OpenStand advocate!