That's just arguing about semantics. It's like the age old "it's not you, it's me" break-up line. Non-Acceptance is Rejection and everyone knows it.

While in general I'd agree that it doesn't add value to add "YC Reject" to the title, in this case the article talks about their YC rejection (sorry "non-acceptance") so including it makes sense.

  Today, a couple of application developers can turn around a decent piece 
  of software for a BlackBerry or an iPhone in a weekend. 

<rant>

Yeah, right. I think blanket statements like these are part of the reason many non-technical people think programming is an easy (& cheap) job, and their eyes spread wide when we tell them what it would take to implement their "awesome" idea.

"Oh, I thought we could do this in a week .."

</rant>

Related - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/209170/how-much-does-it-c...

> I think that Berners-Lee and W3C get way too much credit for the web. And this is an incredibly arrogant statement by Mr. Berners-Lee.

I also think that green is a totally awesome color, and that we can breed birds with horses to produce pegasii. For more attacks on the W3C at best tangential to Mr. Berners-Lee's actual essay, read on.

> Facebook has in-fact done some serious web innovation the last years and W3C has completely dropped the ball. Facebook and Twitter have been catalyzing internet adoption and the general spread of information.

I'll conveniently ignore companies like Flickr, who innovate without compromising data portability: http://laughingmeme.org/2010/05/18/minimal-competence-data-a...

> Mr. Berners-Lee's obsession about content-silos shows that there is a serious disconnect between the current state of the web and W3C. The web was about content and documents fifteen years ago, now it's about the flow of data.

Those URI thingamabobs that send you to content or documents? The web isn't about that anymore. It's about a golden shower of data, flowing down the firehose. You see, when people look up stuff on Wikipedia, they don't care about the page they're on, but the activity data on who's flowing in and out of it.

> I know Berners-Lee is a big Linked Data advocate, but the approach that's being taken by the W3C is painfully slow and doesn't take into account the fluidity of information.

See I took "flow of data" from my previous paragraph, applied my nifty FaceTwit thesaurus to it, and turned up "fluidity of information". More of my fluids to come.

> This is one of the reasons why developers (and even semantic web developers) have resorted to non-W3C technologies more and more: JSON, Javascript-wrappers, Webkit, client-side routing, non-REST HTTP requests, IOSockets/Coment, streaming apis, etc.

Look at me! I'm namedropping web technologies more than hip-hop artists namedrop the Notorious B.I.G or Tupac. I can do this all day: XML Servlet configotrons. Buffered packet gumballs. NoSQL big data Hadoopian piglets mashed up with tagsoup gravy. Activity ICMP hosepipe of RSS-killa sauce.

Pay special attention to my mention of non-REST HTTP requests. You see, REST HTTP requests are a W3C technology. But non-REST HTTP requests? That's not W3C, that's those innovative guys down the hall, second room to the right.

> The web is emergent and out of control. Deal with it. Technologies and tools compete for attention and adoption. You snooze, you lose.

Now I switch from my awesome web developer hat to my social media evangelist hat. This paragraph is not only a segue, it also panders to those of you playing buzzword bingo!

> As for the 'content silos': Are you fucking kidding me? 'Content' being stuck in Facebook is not going to happen, in fact, the content is going to flow more and more. If you mark something as 'only my friends can see this', it will leak. Don't want to be tagged in a picture? Well, you have no choice. Face recognition will get you soon.

I mentioned flow of data previously. But now it's the content that's flowing. The ultra-innovative internet catalyzer Facebook won't be able to keep your data private. Why? Because I say so, that's why.

> The internet, thanks to social web, is a giant copy machine. There's a huge shitstream of content and your attention and the activity around it is the thing that matters. Who cares about the damn content.

Want to know the internet's secret? No one watches Youtube videos. No one shares links to content on Twitter and Facebook. They just look at the activity around it. In fact, if my pal Tim BL didn't write this _content_, I'd still have some activity to do! Furious activity in fact, in the privacy of my room while penning my next ode to Facebook and Twitter.

Btw if you haven't been keeping up on my use of liquids, we've gone from flow to fluidity to shitstream. Which mirrors the general coherence of this comment.

> So maybe it's time for the 'Web Founder' and the W3 Web Museum to roll up their sleeves and do something, instead of bitch about the companies that actually advance the web.

Apple, Google, Microsoft, and the other _companies_ that are members of the World Wide Web _Consortium_ better start rolling up their sleeves. They aren't doing anything to advance the internet.

> So instead of bitching about the companies and people that actually advance the web and change the world, maybe it's time for the 'Web Founder' and the Web Museum to roll up their sleeves and do something...

That last paragraph was so good, I'ma say it twice while flipping the order of my sentence. That's activity, you see. With activity, you can copypasta content, because no one cares about content anymore. And now that I have proven my point, my point is proven.