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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."
Standards will be partially incorporated, but slightly fucked up. Dreamweaver 2k7 and Frontpage Longhorn will output garbled XHTML with a raped form of CSS that fails to display/work properly on any non-IE browser. SVG will turn out to be a disaster in IE, making sure everyone in 2007 is still stuck using JPGs and GIFs. By then IE will have integrated .NET ( Or some other half-assed scripting language. ) scripting abilities tied into the browser to replace the now obsolete potential ActiveX vulenrabilities. People will cry, bitch, moan, whine and Linux is set to take over the desktop market in 2007 again. Blah.
Hate me!
It's time to tell anybody who asks you anything about their computer that they should download Mozilla or Firefox. I do, and most people who've done it have thanked me afterwards.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
There are plenty of alternatives available. In the early days of the web nobody cared about primitive browsers. Let's do the same now.
I don't think there is a need to get XHTML and CSS all gooped full of new features, so I hope it doesn't go in that direction. I know Microsoft will try and take it in that direction to compliment their overcomplicated Long Horn. In my opinion as a user of XHTML and CSS with PHP, I believe that what is required is simlification so that everyday users will want to use XHTML with CSS. Products could provide this but I still think the best way to code websites is by hand. XHTML and CSS are quite satisfactory at this point, but perhaps they may require some refinement. Please no more crazy features, because you can save that for DHTML and Flash (yuck, but good for some). Take a look at CSSzengarden.com if you are not yet convinced in XHTML with CSS is artistically pleasing enough for you. It's a better standard than many websites around.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
but the standards are required to make the web usable to disabled people. Plus with current support you can hack up a page that look basically the same in both browsers, has wonderfully semantic descriptive markup, and doesn't look to bad to boot. Good web developers just have to be smart. Yes it is challenging to work in a field where your clients use a totally non standard set of equipment. So for some clients you code in HTML 4 with tables, most you try to use XHTML with CSS. Most web developers don't make any money, the good ones get rich!
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Until people stop browsing with Netscape Navigator 4.07, standards will be impossible to enforce. The new IE won't change anything. As any designer knows, CSS-based designs are awesome and advantageous in so many ways compared to traditional table presentation. However, while enforcing compatability you sacrifice the visual quality of the site (for old browsers), and most businesses would rather single out handicapped people than certain browsers (makes sense % wise). The only thing everyone agrees on is that the migration AWAY from Internet Explorer would be the best for web standards.
I have mixed feelings on this comment. I don't think that standards stifle innovation so much as they slow its development. In my opinion this isn't a bad thing because spending more time coming to a concensus on how things should work has tended to improve the quality of the standards. I think the W3C has done a tremendous job evolving the standards to cover an enourmous breadth of applications.
Derek
Don't Panic...
Unfortunately, standards have come to mean very little in the browser world. Everyone touts XHTML to be awesome. But have you tried designing a site that uses an XHTML strict schema w/CSS for all your formatting? 3 different browsers can give 3 totally different results - to hell with that "standard." Right now, it's useless. Now, take JavaScript on IE and Mozilla. IE supports the "document.all" collection, while Mozilla relies on "document.getElementById." No problem there, and I know the "all" collection is not part of a "standard." But there are certain times when having the "all" collection can be beneficial. If people can make Mozilla support ActiveX, why can't they support the "all" collection? Clearly it's in the best interest of Mozilla to be compatible with the browser that "defines" unofficial standardization. And I can bitch about IE 6, too - who the hell came up with its selective and strange CSS support? And why did MS really stop developing IE for the Mac?
> But really, standards tend to stifle innovation.
Perhaps I could reword your statement to:
But really, standards have stifled innovation, and they don't have to.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Konqueror is a good start. no extraneous crap like IE. I laughed when I read
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?
There's all the MORE hope for standards. standards that will actually be adhered to creating a sea of non-monoculture browsers, all working to a common goal, instead of one megacorp defining in secret what a browser should do.
Real innovation will come with the proper open standards, allowing ALL people using all OSs to access the web how it was intended.
Many of us have been conditioned to think that both standards and innovation are good things. And the latter is an overused word that Microsoft marketing has forced into the memestream. But really, standards tend to stifle innovation.
That all depends which layer you're looking at. Standards tend to set things in stone, which is actually a good thing when the thing you're trying to innovate lives above the standardized layer.
For example; do you really want everybody to download the newest whizz-bang version of some operating system that doesn't comply with any standards daily? You'd have to port all your stuff all the time. Not much time left to do innovative stuff!
In fact, some standards don't preclude innovation, but they abstract it out of view. Most software is easily ported amond POSIX compliant OSes, because they, well, adhere to the POSIX standards. That doesn't mean the OS can be really innovative, with whizz-bang multimedia features, a microkernel, and a database filesystem.
TCP/IP sockets are a good example of a standard that encourages innovation; you can just open a socket and write bytes to it, or read from them. Your application can be a peer2peer voip application, and the network implementation doesn't care about that. The network can be a satellite internet connection, gigabit, or even postal pigeons, and the application doesn't care about that (well.. pigeons might be a bad choice for VOIP, but stay with me here).
Of course, it isn't all good; if you want all the nifty features of IPv6 you will have to rewrite some applications.. But IPv4 has seen us through twenty odd years. I'd say that was one of them good standards.
How would engineers like it if there were no standards for bolts and rivets? Bridge building would be a nightmare!
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
It wasn't that long ago that people made an active choice to download a browser. It's not an uncommon choice.
This article paints a gloom picture, but no one seems to see the light.
If Microsoft wants to wait to release a new browser then this merely opens a nice hole for increased market penetration.
The gap will fill, but not if people complain Microsoft is not innovating.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
You can bet the second a competitor gains a single percent of desktop penetration with some new browser MS will suddenly release a ream of IE updates despite what they've said. So I say bring on the innovation, either way IE users win.
This article brings up many good points about IE's potential of totalitarian rule over the internet in the future, but I feel that it lacks insight on certain predictions, especially those regarding longhorn.
For one, the time it will take for longhorn to be widely adopted isn't factored into this hypothesis at all. It's 2004, that means its something around 4 years since the release of Windows XP. But is it as ubiquitous as this author claims it is? Absolutely not. It costs a lot of money to upgrade a whole mess of computers to a new MS operating system, and many people just don't need to for whatever reason, so in many fronts, it hasn't been done. My high school has some 100-200 computers: some are brand spankin' new dells with XP, others are Windows 2000, and there are more than just a few OS 9 macs floating around there as well. M$ can't assume that longhorn's release - and subsequently the release of XAML, etc - will take web dominance even within four years. It will take much, much longer.
So do the math. We've had a year or so heads up on the threats that longhorn posits to the Interweb, we have 2 1/2 more at least until the sucker actually comes out, and then over 4 years for reasonable ubiquity of the OS to make developing all future websites in technologies like XAML, etc worthwhile. That's nearly a total of eight years for standards to be utilized and improved upon. There is no reason why technologies like XUL, CSS2.1 (or even 3), and SVG can't be the accepted norm before then. The word just needs to get out somehow, but that's another post altogether...
On another note, regarding his mentioning of a Google-branded mozilla or something thrown into the forray, that's just overkill. Just imagine if, instead, Google merely placed these words on the bottom list of links on its homepage:
Really, they'd only need to have it up there for what... a month? two weeks? for it to make a HUGE impact in IE's dominance. Imagine......
eric http://www.ericdfields.com/
"With the next version of Internet Explorer tied to the release of longhorn, and still years off
Heavens thats actually a good thing. It means that the other popular browsers, Mozilla/Firefox, Opera and others. Can continue to gain ground setting the standards that Longhorn+IE will have adhere to.
, what hope is there for innovation in CSS, SVG, XHTML and other web standards?
I'd say there is a good hope, Longhorn/IE will undoubtably break / embrace and extend web standards, probably offering some "revolutionary technology" which is infact a rehash of an existing standard butchered and twisted to work only in IE.
Is the future of the web similarly tied to Internet Explorer and Longhorn?
I sincerely hope not. Now is the time for web-developers to start building with upcoming standards and tools. Id like to see all browsers fully supporting SVG for a start. In this interim period of no new IE versions we have the ability to build and popularise the technologies that are available to us before they get the IE poisoning. It is, after all the tools developers decide to use that drives the future, and by pushing boundaries innovations can be realised.
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I'd rather like to see browsers that can handle SVG natively first. Plugins don't count because of their operational problems. (Automatically deploy a security update for a plugin from Adobe? Good luck!)
Quick, bring on more stuff to make things go even slower!
I'm happy with web pages with pictures on them. In fact, uninvent Flash and I'll be even happier!
As a developer, I find XHTML to be a huge improvement on HTML - it just makes more sense. No more half-assed guesses as to whether or not a tag needs to be closed or VARIATIONS in tag name CASES that SEEM to BE randomly switched BETWEEN by CERTAIN web designers.
I'm guessing you're not actually a developer? Most developers I know don't have to make "half-assed guesses" about the language they work with, they know it. Also, what does case have to do with anything? Your main arguments against HTML don't really make much sense.
I'm guessing you're not actually a developer? Most developers I know don't have to make "half-assed guesses" about the language they work with, they know it. Also, what does case have to do with anything? Your main arguments against HTML don't really make much sense.
I'm guessing you're not actually a programmer? If you've ever written a program which parses HTML or decorates it in some way, you'd appreciate what a god-send it is to have a simple, consistent syntax for operating on the document tree. XHTML is the deal.
There's all the MORE hope for standards. standards that will actually be adhered to creating a sea of non-monoculture browsers, all working to a common goal, instead of one megacorp defining in secret what a browser should do.
That would be great if the vast majority of people would use them. The last time I looked, about 95% of people are using IE. Even if those numbers are off, most people use IE. That means that people have to make sure that their pages work in IE.
Standards are good. Standards that people develop to are better. Standards, no matter how good, that don't impact the majority of end-users are useless.
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
> But really, standards tend to stifle innovation.
You're baiting. Standards seek a balance to make innovation better. You just need to look at mobile phones.
In the EU, the GSM standard allowed common platform across europe, allowing seamless roaming, large array of handsets for a massive market -- and all the innovations that result.
In the US, the fractured array of mobile standards leave a higher cost for compatibility, and a lower choice: meaning users get locked in, without much incentive to change, for which vendors can play upon. Innovation has a limited scope.
I'd like to know a little bit about the guy who wrote this article. He links to some of the usual standards gurus in his sidebar (Eric Meyer, Jeffrey Zeldman, CSS Zen Garden) but I can't find any background information on him.
I'm not saying that his musings aren't valid, but I'd like to know where he's coming from and what sort of relevant work he does that involves web standards. This would give the article more context and help me to understand better why he says what he does.
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
Before y'all get up in arms, I'm not disputing that there's uglyness to HTML, and CSS is a huge step forward. However, CSS is a huge, bloated beast, and I can't really see how SVG advances the web. IMNSHO, the web should be:
- An easy way to access information
- Simple, adhering to the lowest reasonable common denominator that works across all common browsers (HTML 4, limited CSS, etc.)
- Not filled with bloat and fluff that doesn't help me access information (such as flash intros, flash menus, Java menu crap, etc.)
Many of the webmonkeys I've known in my company that complain about such things not working are the same people who couldn't do HTML by hand if they wanted to, insist that beauty should take priority over functionality, and develop IE-only pages because they never thought to test any other browser and then blame those browsers for not supporting the latest, greatest standard. Here's a tip: if you want people to use your stuff, you have to provide it in a format their tools can understand. You can't expect everyone to upgrade, so you have to work to your audience.
Granted, I, too, would like to shoot everyone using NS 4.x, but there are still people out there running it and viewing my site at 640x480. I don't know how they can stand it, but it's their choice. My choice is to continue to support them as well as possible, for the moment. So I don't really concern myself with the new standards. Besides, for me, I have little to no use for them at the moment anyway.
IMHO, mis-applied Java and Flash are the worst two things that ever happened on the web. And those were both "innovations", especially the Java bit. So understand if I'm wary about any so called "improvements" to what already works pretty darn well and is just now starting to truly work the same (mostly) in most mainstream browsers.
That said, I run Fire(name this week) and, yes, I don't have the Flash plugin installed. F@#$ing hate flash. Bane of my existance.
MSFT won't do anything until they feel some pressure from the market.
The idea of a Google branded browser based on Gecko would work. Especially if the Google desktop tools work best with this browser.
Getting Google to rank pages based on standards compliance would work (XHTML/CSS2+ design = higher page rank = more sites wanting compliance = less sites holding onto IE6 only designs.)
A Windows version of Safari might work. If an iTunes install put it on the system (like it does now with QuickTime) then people might use it -- hard to say if that would provide any market pressure though.
If something doesn't come along to shake up Microsoft (and it's got to be big, like the Internet in 1995) then things will not change in Redmond. At this point in time, Google is the only thing big and successful enough to rattle their cage.
-ch
> The CSS standard is crap.
Statements like this illuminate a kind of ineptitude that is too revealing for a place like Slashdot. If you dislike CSS or you have had a hard time using it... if you are frustrated with it: ask for help, or just simply state that you are frustrated. Don't bash the standard because you have had a hard time with it.
The templates on csszengarden.com are all created by graphic artists who believe in CSS and what it can do. They don't spend months on each template. In fact, I find it easier to create fast, graphically appealing websites with XHTML/CSS than I have ever created with HTML and Microsoft-friendly tag attributes. It all comes down to compliance and follwing the rules. Maybe CSS needs some refinement, and that I won't debate, but to bash the whole standards seems rather uninformed.
> A good example of the futility of working with the CSS standard is Jeffrey Zeldman's site www.zeldman.com. This site has been through so many redesigns yet inevitably each new redesign breaks in some major browser or other.
Maybe he's redesigned it so many times because it's fast and easy to do so? Part of the problem with many standards is when designers try to take it too far. They should all just keep it simple and the results will be better; there will be less trouble. The web is for information distribution, and therefore it's quite possible to create an appealing website that doesn't break browsers.
The trouble with standards, starts and stops with the browsers that try to change the standards to support some kind of corporate domination theory. When browsers support standards, the way they were meant to be supported, browsers wouldn't break when reading sites designed with standards.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Two things:
First of all, compact discs, like all the formats before them, were developed for one major purpose: to make you rebuy the music you already own. The record industry does this. Every few decades they switch to an entirely new format and make people buy their music all over again. We're due for a new format shortly, expect them to start pushing music dvd's like crazy (we're already seeing this, but expect it to get bigger and for dvd players to become essential components in a home stereo system).
Secondly, the W3C does not ignore common sense. Yes, there are things which should have been easier to do with CSS-based layout (mostly stuff that emulates other media, like footers below a multicolumn layout). However, you can not escape the notion that CSS-based design is vastly more powerful and time-saving than old-style design. Now you can finally separate content from presentation, and redesign your site without having to rewrite content. That's a major win for any large site. Another benefit is that CSS-based design saves bandwidth by producing smaller pages and allowing the presentation to be cached between browser sessions (if you link your stylesheet externally).
You can go look at the discussion about CSS in the W3C mailing list archives and see the reason behind every single feature and quirk of the language.
The main problem with CSS-based design right now is that the browser with the largest marketshare has really poor support for the coolest stuff in CSS, ensuring that what the standard says should be the right way to do stuff often doesn't pan out when you try it in real life. Moving the web forward from IE6 is desperately needed, but I'm not going to hold my breath until it happens. Maybe if the alternative browsers manage to get enough marketshare to make cross-browser design a must market pressures will cause microsoft to respond with IE7, despite earlier claims they're not going to do that. But it's doubtful microsoft will respond to market pressures anytime soon. It's just not their shtick.
The whole point is that you don't code for a specific browser, even if it is the superior. You code for the standards, and all else should follow from that.
What is the target audience of the program? If it's even remotly aimed at IT savy people, your stats will be far from representative.
55% sounds too good to be true.
In my opinion the role of a standards body is to codify existing practice, not to create new ideas.
The fact that the W3C tries to innovate is exactly why it is becoming less and less relevent in the real world.
That's the difference between de jure and de facto standards. The only de jure standards are ISO publications. All others are de facto. Even the Internet (the RFCs) are de facto standards, not de jure standards.
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Think we can start a trend?
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Of course, one could argue that if the point of CSS is to separate content from presentation, your approach is in violation. That is, nesting divs and such for the sole purpose of accomodating CSS is adjusting the content of the HTML to the presentation of the CSS.
To truly separate content from style, you would start with a blank editor, put in your various HTML wrapper tags, and mark up your document based simply on the semantics of it. Using <em> and <strong> instead of <i> and <b>, for example.
Only when you have a semantically-pure HTML document would you dive into the CSS file and try to fit it to your existing document. That's what all the child selectors and such are useful for in the first place.
Of course, I don't think CSS support has advanced this far yet. Here's hoping.
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If a popular web site stopped working, the IE users would just stop going to the formerly popular web site.
They'd feel that it was the fault of the web site author, and not their browser. After all, it used to work, and now it doesn't work. They didn't change their browser, so the web site must have changed.
And thus it is the fault of the web site owner.
It doesn't matter that they made their web site "standards compliant". Customers don't give a rats behind about "standards compliant". The only thing they care about is "Does it work with my browser".
If it doesn't, they'll either complain to the site owner (unlikely) or they'll just stop using the site.
I don't' agree. If a popular site just stops working, then yes, users would leave. However, that would be brain-dead. Instead, you change the home page for users coming in with IE. You give them some nice PR speech about how you have added "exciting and new" features for their enjoyment. However, to take advantage of those new features, their "web browser" would need to be updated. Then have simple instructions for installing Firebird and have a direct link to the download. Firebird has a nice and simple installer.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Exactly...In theory. I mean, I guess the best you can do is 1) make pages that validate and 2) worry about whether they work in a certain browser, in that order, and, I guess, Utopia will follow. But, in reality, web developers who are conscious of what's going on aren't as common as we'd all like to believe. Others are pressured by clients, or are simply Joe User's who are "Putting theyselfs up one o' them innernet sites!" with Frontpage. So, not everyone cares IN THE LEAST whether they're using a browser that renders pages correctly. If an IE user comes upon a pages that validates XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS level 2 perfectly, but displays wrong on their screen, the site is, in their minds "broken" and it "sucks". Ouch!
BenCurry.net
How can you tell if its MSIE 6.0 or just someone claiming to be?
It's a bit like saying "What's the future of email?". Email is and always will be simple text with the useful extension of being able to attach files.
Err, what? Email didn't originally have the ability to attach files. So asking "what's the future of email?" is perfectly sensible, as there's already been one fundamental change to its nature. Same goes with the web. It was originally text-only with next to no layout, until people invented <img>, <table>, stylesheets, etc.
Taking CSS as an example (to counter the pro CSS bias in the article): if I want to separate formatting information from content then I'll make that choice and write in that manner locally.
Huh? CSS is a method of doing just that!
Further, does CSS solve the most important Web related issue? Does it enable your non-techno-obsessed friends/relatives onto the web? No. It simply makes it more confusing and makes them further reliant on software that they simply have no interest in buying.
Please explain how Mom surfing the net is confused when a website uses CSS, or has to buy something to make CSS work.
The deeper point here is that the whole idea of creating setting web-standards from on-high is a bit silly really. You cannot and should not be able to control what happens out there.
You misunderstand. The point of agreeing on specifications is that we can build software and write documents that work well together. When they don't work well together, things break and the end-users lose out.
The Web *is already* what it was designed to be: hypertext pages (and URL). It's had some nice additions - a *long time ago*- but stop already!
Why? That's like saying "hey, horse-drawn carriages already get us from point A to point B, so stop already!" when somebody suggests cars may be useful.