Slashdot Mirror
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."
Actually, there might be hope if Mozilla was available as an Internet Explorer plugin.. similar to adobe pdf and macromedia flash plugins. When a page wanted to use the mozilla renderer for advanced features, it would simply tell them to install a plugin, which most IE users don't think twice about. Eventually, these users may get tired of seeing most everything in a plugin browser, and may want to try using mozilla standalone.
If we Ignore the attempts of Microsoft and others to make the web dependent on proprietary formats, etc. for a moment, the future of the web is quite exiting.
I'm talking about the Semantic Web, which is an attempt to deal with the IMO biggest problem with the web, and especially searching the web for information: you can only search according to syntax. Words, regexes, etc. is really the best you can do right now.
Searching would be so much better if we had semantics. Semantics would make searches and web pages in general much easier for computers to index and relate to what is actually being searched for.
An example: searching for "a yellow car for sale in $CITY, with a cost between $VAL1 and $VAL2." would not give a lot of unusable results today, but the semantic web would return what is actually asked for.
Of course, all this is just theory, and a best-case scenario example. And there are lots of obstacles for the semantic web; many people are happy with the web as it is, and it will take a long time to implement it.
Probably, some ideas would be incorporated slowly into the web as we know it now.
"As a brief aside, if I were Google ..., who are rumored to be working on client side technologies for managing information, I'd put a lot of energy into Mozilla, and release a Google branded browser..."
Mozilla, and Open Source in general has an amazing window of opportunity right now. A product tie in like the one described in the article is exactly what is needed.
IE looks as if it will remain stagnant for at least another couple of years. If there is a Mozilla marketing arm, they should be jumping in with both feet.
Similarly, now is the time for Open Office to get the MS Word compatibility bugs sorted out and to mount a big attack on the corporate sector.
If the Open Source community waits another year or two MS will steamroller them with the latest and greatest MS OS and Office packages. If they jump now and can find backers to finance PR and advertising, groups like Mozilla could make major gains.
Three Squirrels