Don’t get me wrong, I have tremendous respect for Joe and his abilities. His work on Firebug is amazing and use it everyday as a web developer. Though I did not get to use his other popular work, the Facebook client for iOS, I think I did indirectly use it as the Facebook Android app seems to have been a direct port of it.

But recently, he wrote a missive about how the web needs a benevolent dictator so the technologies can be herded into something more coherent and has more vision. Admirable sentiment, but the way he goes about justifying his position is a little grating, as he accuses of people who support open web and its’ democratic ways of technology concensus-building are ‘arrogant’. I was like “what? he cannot be serious”. But he did write something very similar a year ago, I suppose.

So apparently, an year or so of working on iOS, which I think where his inspiration for a benevolent dictator comes from (so we could all craft perfect snow-flake like web apps) he’s back to hacking on the web. I can understand his frustration when it comes to slow place of development on the web, but that’s how concensus-building works. You can deride Android all you want for its’ fragmentation, but if you want an open source mobile platform that takes everybody’s aspirations into consideration, you have to live with some constraints.

Not to get all political about it, but this argument sounds exactly like people who prefer dictators to a democracy because things get done faster that way, and because consensus-building is maddeningly slow. But what if some laymen have better ideas than dictators? How does that get factored in? If you see his argument that open web advocates are “arrogant”, this is almost funny. You’re asking for a dictator over a bunch of technologies that affect billions of people and you’re accusing the others of arrogance? Whoa. That’s some mind-bending stuff right there, bro.

I won’t even go into his way of consensus-building. Accusing people with differing view points of being “arrogant” or “complacent” because he had had experience in building for closed platforms and how much better the experience is. Sure it is, and this problem is not even new. Have you heard of trade-offs? But accusing the same people you need to win over of being complacent and arrogant is not the way for concensus building. Unless you’re just whining about it.

But if Joe has some constructive suggestions as to how to improve specific parts of the web from sucking hard (and they do) instead of over-arching arguments like everything will be so much better under a benevolent dictator, I’m sure we are all ears to listen. Heck, I can’t wait to see what he works on next. I can only hope it will be for the betterment of the open web.