---
title: Open Committee
abstract: 8.8 million lines of code!
categories:
- work
- culture
content-tags:
- web
- standards
- humor
external: https://safelyignored.com/open-committee
---

Nevermind Netflix, the best drama shows these days are on the W3C mail ists. Recent episodes of [www-style](http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2014Feb/0130.html) are gems, where characters like [Maciej](https://twitter.com/othermaciej) (Apple), [Tab](https://twitter.com/tabatkins) (Google), and [Boris](https://twitter.com/bz_moz) battle over the evolution of CSS, with Apple backing Adobe's proposed [Regions](http://alistapart.com/blog/post/css-regions-considered-harmful), and Google pushing aggressively for [Shadow DOM](http://www.inserthtml.com/2013/09/web-components/).

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](http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/164131) and poked fun at Google's weird PR about slimming down WebKit cruft after the Blink fork (a [long-running joke](https://www.webkit.org/blog/2455/last-week-in-webkit-millions-of-lines/)) and their more recent "MOBILE-PERFORMANCE-OR-DIE-TRYING" mantra.

Bug trackers and version control systems generally lack &lt;humor&gt; 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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7243328), people.
