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Future for Web Standards Pondered
An anonymous reader writes "With the next version of Internet Explorer tied to the release of longhorn, and still years off, what hope is there for innovation in CSS, SVG, XHTML and other web standards? Is the future of the web similarly tied to Internet Explorer and Longhorn? This article ponders this gloomy future, and sees a ray or two of hope."
Site is already slowing...
Plus ca change
In a recent post I reminisced about the early days of CSS, and a few of the people I recall as influential and important in the development of a standards based web.
But usually I am the kind of person who looks to the future. In the last few months Microsoft made a couple of very significant announcements with possibly quite negative implications for the future of a standards based web. Which has me thinking about that future, and wondering whether there even is such future.
Since the release of Netscape and Internet Explorer 4, there has been a steady movement toward the idea of standards based web development. In some respects the innovation both in the underlying standards and their implementation has been quite extraordinary. But as the kids in the back seat are always asking "Are we there yet"?
In a sense, there is no "there". Perhaps plateaus or way stations along the way, but no final destination. Right now it may seem like we are at one of those way stations. A reasonably large subset of CSS2 (soon to become CSS2.1) is quite well supported by most browsers.
CSS and xhtml support are markedly improved since the early parts of this decade.
But is it a way station, or are we just stalled?
Microsoft has in the last few months both discontinued IE for the Macintosh altogether, and let it be known there will be no new IE for today's generation of Windows based computers. The next iteration of IE will be solely for "longhorn" based systems (longhorn being the code name for the successor to Windows XP). Any such systems are unlikely before 2006, leaving a several year hiatus between major upgrades for IE, the single most pervasive web platform by a long way. And at present the platform with the most web standards "issues".
Which makes wonder - will we see standards based innovation in future?
Who cares about standards?
When it comes to commercial competition, standards are the friend of those without market dominance. The dominant player sets the "industry standard", as companies who dominate their niche tend to describe their software.
I believe that during the second half of the 1990s, during the most innovative time of the development CSS, commercial considerations did not play a significant part either in the development of CSS or in its implementation in browsers. CSS flew below the radar at Microsoft and Netscape/AOL/Time Warner. That won't happen again.
So what might the future hold? Let's turn the browsers for a moment. What happens here will determine what happens with CSS and standards more generally.
Where are we now?
Internet Explorer 6
When Microsoft did not dominate the browser market, open standards leveled the paying field for them. But now with IE dominant, will Microsoft be so supportive of standards?
Internet Explorer 6 is for Windows only. It supports much of CSS 2.1 though support for attribute based selectors, and more sophisticated selectors in general, such as the child selector is limited. It has some serious issues with the box model and positioning which cause many developers considerable frustration.
As noted before, IE 6 is the last version of IE which will be available until probably mid 2006, perhaps later, and the next version will never work on today's computers, not even on XP.
It's the end of the road for IE as we know it.
So, if things stay as they are, with Internet Explorer the benchmark, then say goodbye to CSS innovation for a long long time.
There are number of things which may affect this. First, CSS's design to allow forward compatibility means the user experience for more advanced browsers can be enhanced without compromising the experience of IE users. And there is even a simple way of hiding things from IE, using the child selector, which no version of IE on windows supports.
If not IE, who will innovate?
Opera? Mozilla? Anyone?
The more important question is who will innovate on the
Konqueror has a lot of CSS rendering problems.
But QT is no longer available in its GPL version for Windows' platforms. KDE developpers could still buy a license (or one for each platform!): $2000 is the cheapest you can get...
"With the next version of Internet Explorer tied to the release of longhorn, and still years off"
But there's MS Internet Explorer 6 SP2 scheduled to be released on september together with a SP for MS Windows XP.
It isn't a total new version but I belive they will incorporate some of that features.
Amen. I keep a copy of Firefox in my toolkit for when I need to exorcize the demons from the computers of my friends and family. I tell them to use Firefox for "the internet" instead of IE. It takes some convincing, usually, because most folks associate the little blue "e" on their desktop with "the internet". Once they use Firefox for a while and discover the joys of a pop-up free web experience, there is usually a 12-pack of cold frosties waiting for me.
It is up to all of us techies to help spread the word to our less-knowledgeable friends/family about Firefox, AdAware, Spybot, Oo.org, etc. If we can get these folks to break away from non-standards compliant software, then we will all benefit.
TODO: Insert witty sig
Why? The only chance Opera has to compete with Internet Explorer and Mozilla on the desktop is by inventing and adding new features to their browser.
Opera has many great coders and inventors working for them, such as Håkon Wium Lie the creator of CSS. How can mozilla compete with such a experienced and professional team?
Opera has included many features in their browser, like email, newsreader, rss feed and irc, and still their installer is only 3.5 Mb, and the fastest browser out there.
Wasnt it opera who invented mouse-gestures?
In my eyes the main challenger for Opera would be Google if they decided to make a browser, but their first rule in their philosophy say:
"It's best to do one thing really, really well. - Google does search"
So i guess they will focus on search.
Simpsons 11:11: Lisa: They must have programmed it to eliminate the competition - Bart: You mean like microsoft?
The author of the article thinks that Safari is the best browser. Safari is a derivative of the open source browser Konqueror. Therefore the parent poster is definately ON topic...
Actually Dreamweaver MX 2004 does generate complient code if you watch what your doing. If you dont check your code after you finish, then you might have some issues.
I would be more worried about hose who use word as an html editor. Frontpage tends to have a lot of proretary extensions that people like to use. A Page counter? Cool i got to have one of those.
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
FIrstly, QT was never available under GPL on Windows. It was available under a free for non-profit basis (some restricted "freeware" license). This stopped with the 2.3 release because lots of Win32 developers would just use it and never buy the full license until the final release of the program. In other words, buy 1 license for mutliple developers and only near the end of the release cycle.
Additioanlly, the $2000 license is a propreitary license. You can not just simply compile konqueror on it for both technical and financial reasons. Konq uses KDE extensions to QT, which are not available with the QT on Windows. Secondly, Konq and KHTML are released under the GPL, which means that the Windows developer would have to release the code under GPL too. I suppose this could be stall point as recuperating costs could be a problem. I know donations can be accepted but no guarantees.
now supporting:
cmdrTaco for president '04
michael for oval office intern summer '05
As usual, service packs incorporate mainly (in XPSP2: security-) fixes, no new features.
Internet Explorer SP2 however will include some new features like popup-blocking and better mime-type handling but nothing along the lines of better support for PNG alpha transparency...
Currently, a Gecko ActiveX control already exists, and guess what, it's using the same interface as the IE/MSHTML control does! The author of that control is shipping a simple tool that replaces a classid in an application with the mozilla classid and so patches it to use mozilla. Don't know if it works for iexplore.exe, but it should... See http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/mozilla.htm :)
On the eigth day, god started debugging
Maybe his tagline would help.
the amazing adventures of one guy in a small room writing software, namely Style Master
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
unless of course they have already installed the 400 KB Google toolbar or any of the free, small, pop-up blockers to be found on the net. IE remains overwealmingly the browser of choice: Google Zeitgeist.
As much as I am a fan of everything mozilla, and can't stand IE, the next version of IE will come out in Windows XP SP2. Lets get our facts straight.
What's new? Apparently a pop-up blocker, and extensions. (That sounds familiar.) Also they locked down the "default zone" so that if (when) a security breach occurs, a virus won't be running in a privileged security mode.
This all comes at a cost. Some old plug-ins don't work. At least that'll back the people off from bitching when Firefox 0.9 comes out and everybody has to fix their extensions.
Get Firefox!
There is still work going on to further web standards. SVG 1.2 is coming along and, according to Dean Jackson here at WWW2004, a working draft for XBL should be forthcoming (after being separated out from SVG 1.2).
Another interesting thing is the upcoming workshop on web applications and compound document which will be addressing the issues of mixed namespace documents and also the things needed for the development of sophisticated web applications using SVG, XHTML, etc.
> why can't they support the "all" collection?
See the bugs on the issue. In short, sites commonly test whether document.all exists to test for IE. Then if they detect it exists they commonly assume the following:
1) IE event model (which is totally different from
the W3C one).
2) VBScript support
3) IE CSS extensions support (filter, expression,
etc).
and so forth. So implementing document.all would in fact break a number of sites that work fine with Mozilla right now unless a whole slew of other IE stuff got implemented too.
Note that IE does getElementById fine, so you can just use the getElementById code for both browser....
If you feel like trying, read this. It's about packaging ActiveX controls. I'm sure you could take Firebird 0.7 (no installer, which makes it a bit easier) and packing an ActiveX with it. Of course, if you succed, post the result to /.
c ti vex/packaging.asp
http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/components/a
There is. Go to the Mozilla Marketing Project and take a look.
To submit a marketing request, go to the main Bugzilla database, and select Marketing as the category.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.