Yeah congrats to TBL and his baby. Actually, I believe the date is slightly off, and it should be August, 6th, according to the fist website [1], and in particular [2] linked from there.
But I've got to ask what has W3C done lately? I mean JavaScript and CSS is not their fault, but looking at W3C's accomplishments, they were busy with XML and WS-* (SOAP), then RDF/Sparql, and whatnot most of the time, creating a cottage industry of "enterprise" standards but completely loosing relevance on the web. Meanwhile, HTML stagnated, and CSS had to become the way overcomplicated beast it is today to make up for HTML's shortcomings, HTML still mostly being the casual academic publishing markup language it always was.
The result is the monopolistic browser landscape we have today and web authoring becoming unapproachable for all but an entrenched profession of "web developers" when the web was primarily a medium for easy self-publishing. Soon, Google implanted itself as the middle man, when getting rid of publishers and closed networks was the whole point of the web in the first place. Meanwhile, W3C continues to take money for driving CSS complexity ad absurdum (though they have talented people on the CSS WG for sure) and drops requirements for at least two interworking implementations for their XML stuff (such as XSLT). Basically, W3C is acting like a self-serving, pay-as-you org for advertising stuff as "standard". W3C's HTML 5 and SVG efforts have effectively stopped about three years ago.
Today, almost nobody is inspired to make websites; even developers flock to github and other centralized services for their stuff.
As much as I believe TBL acted in good faith, I think W3C as a standardization organization failed on all accounts that you could reasonably expect from a standardization effort.
But I've got to ask what has W3C done lately? I mean JavaScript and CSS is not their fault, but looking at W3C's accomplishments, they were busy with XML and WS-* (SOAP), then RDF/Sparql, and whatnot most of the time, creating a cottage industry of "enterprise" standards but completely loosing relevance on the web. Meanwhile, HTML stagnated, and CSS had to become the way overcomplicated beast it is today to make up for HTML's shortcomings, HTML still mostly being the casual academic publishing markup language it always was.
The result is the monopolistic browser landscape we have today and web authoring becoming unapproachable for all but an entrenched profession of "web developers" when the web was primarily a medium for easy self-publishing. Soon, Google implanted itself as the middle man, when getting rid of publishers and closed networks was the whole point of the web in the first place. Meanwhile, W3C continues to take money for driving CSS complexity ad absurdum (though they have talented people on the CSS WG for sure) and drops requirements for at least two interworking implementations for their XML stuff (such as XSLT). Basically, W3C is acting like a self-serving, pay-as-you org for advertising stuff as "standard". W3C's HTML 5 and SVG efforts have effectively stopped about three years ago.
Today, almost nobody is inspired to make websites; even developers flock to github and other centralized services for their stuff.
As much as I believe TBL acted in good faith, I think W3C as a standardization organization failed on all accounts that you could reasonably expect from a standardization effort.
[1]: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
[2]: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/History.html
Edit: see also [3] for the proper date
[3]: https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/1991/08/art-6484.txt