# Lunch with Karl Dubost

- Author: Joichi Ito
- Date: 2003-06-06T17:50:06Z


Olivier on the left and Karl on the rightHad lunch with Karl Dubost, the Conformance Manager of the W3C and Olivier Thereaux who also works for the W3C. I met Olivier once when he dropped by Moda when I was spinning records. Karl was visiting Japan and working with Olivier. Karl's well known to many of my friends and it was cool meeting him after having heard about him from so many people.

Karl's job at the W3C includes making sure that the standards and the processes "conform" and are well-formed. He's kind of the standards guy for the standards guys.

We talked about RSS, open API's and the balance between simple standards with low barriers to entry and strict and consensus based standards which have a higher "cost" associated with them. Karl talked about how they were trying to make some of the processes at the W3C simpler. I think we all agreed that it really depended on the stage and the type of standard when deciding what sort of process was best for standardization.

We talked about the difficulty of getting developers in English speaking countries to think about internationalization issues. We agreed that we needed to keep pushing people to use UTF-8. I think we got over some of the initial negative reaction to UTF-8 in Japan and how we needed the developers in the US to start using UTF-8 so it will make our (I personally didn't do much) efforts worth it. Both Karl and I have our blogs set to UTF-8.





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