arunranga's blog

South By Southwest is a phenomenon. After my first visit last year, I've stopped thinking of it as just a big music thing in Austin, Texas (silly me). This year, I'm speaking on two panels as part of the Interactive Festival part of SxSW. I'm chairing one of these panels.

On Sunday at 5PM, I'm speaking on a panel called "How To Get your Company to Embrace Mashup Culture." Kevin Lawver's got Alla Gringaus (from Time Inc.), Steve Chipman (of WIM fame and SlayerOffice fame), Greg Cypes (Mr. OpenAIM) and myself talking about some of the things we did at AOL to usher in a wave of cool zeitgeisty stuff. I'm excited to talk about AOL and the cool things our folks did with OpenID, amongst other things.

Aside from us hapless Web developers, few people really think about HTML when they surf the Web. The average user's Web site of choice is likely to work with their browser of choice. The fact that this is the case can largely be seen as a testament to the W3C standardization process -- HTML just about works, tag soup notwithstanding.

Not many people know about the often acrimonious debates between Microsoft and Netscape that induced this kind of interoperability in the past, or about a certain HTML working group meeting in Colorado a few years ago where everyone worked all night on HTML so that they could go skiing all day. The point is, HTML is out there -- the mavens have spoken. So what's all the fuss about?

Arun Ranganathan works for AOL LLC as a System Architect in the Web Personalization group in Mountain View, California. He is also AOL's Advisory Committee Representative to the World Wide Consortium. Previously, Arun was a Technology Evangelist for Netscape Communications when it chaperoned the Mozilla project, and has a longstanding interest in browsers, web standards, and consumer software. His numerous passions are typically covered in his personal blog.