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Free isn’t always free
Web standards advocates show their love for the World Wide Web Consortium‘s recommendations every day through little buttons or links at the bottom of their pages. These links tout the sites’ sound use of W3C’s standards via popular free online validation services.
The movement’s most visible face is a growing and financially challenging component of the W3C’s budget, and the group needs your help to keep it alive. For a small donation, corporate gift (Hewlett-Packard gave a server) or volunteer time, users can help this valuable service stay in operation.
Open-sourcers find advertising antithetical to their movement. Passing on ads — a sure bet for the millions of hits the validators get a month — is a principled and costly decision.
However, the economic downturn is showing a lot of Internet companies that they can’t count on a giant pile of ad money to fuel their ventures. In a blog post, free Web dating site Plentyoffish’s founder laments about the advertisement downturn and a surging, but server-intensive, user base. He writes, “The bigger you get as a free site the less money you make per visit and the more it costs to service a visit.”
Some bloggers suggest the W3C mirror the validator and spread the bandwidth drain. Others think a desktop tool would do the job. (Enterprising developers can grab the open-source code.) As a central part of the standards movement, it seems most logical to host the validators with the W3C, but it may become necessary to spread the pain. Servers and bandwidth aren’t cheap. Even free costs something.
(Via RefreshCleveland)