My friend, Chris Wilson, posted on his blog today that he is leaving the IE team in order to focus on the “open web platform.” He’ll be doing this from the Developer Division at Microsoft and in his role as the chair of the HTML Working Group at the W3C (according to Chris):
Luckily, I found a great team to work on – I’ll be working in the Developer Division (a first for me), on the team that works on JavaScript but also has a broader charter to help make the open web platform great.
What does this mean? From the outside, some things will certainly change – I’m no longer an appropriate person, for example, to give talks on specifically about IE – but a lot of things won’t. I still expect to attend and participate in a fair number of web conferences, and still plan to speak at a number of them – but not just about IE. I still intend to continue as HTML WG chair, at least for the time being – in fact, as part of focusing more holistically on the web platform as a whole (and defocusing on IE product delivery), I expect I’ll start participating more in a couple of other groups.
I’m not sure what to make of this. I like Chris a lot. He’s a good guy and I’ve known him for about 13 years. Part of me wishes that he’d leave Microsoft but contribute to the open web somewhere else, unencumbered by Microsoft’s issues or agenda and visibly separate from IE and its history. It will be interesting to see what comes of this.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
.