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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
1) I believe Konqueror is the best browser currently out there. Some will complain that it is not available for Windows. But then, why should, or since based on Qt, why shouldn't it be possible
2) The most important thing for standards is that not patented technology will be allowed to sneak into the standards.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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 see it on the streets. "Damn I hate these popups." "Use Mozilla."
As long as we keep telling everyone that there is an alternative superior to IE, they will begin using it. Eventually, people will have to build websites for Mozilla, and then we will be back to the IE/Netscape wars. Except this time, nothing new will be coming from Microsoft for several years.
I strongly suggest we build our websites with XHTML and CSS and ignore IE. We can put a message on our sites "We have detected that you are using IE. We require a standards based browser. Please download Mozilla, Firebird, or Opera."
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
That said, XHTML is fucking stupid.
And that statement is based on what?
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.
Tables are discouraged which means XHTML code written by a competent developer is much simpler, presentation and content are easier (but IMHO not yet easy enough) to separate so designers have an easier time of things, the structure of XHTML is consistent, unambiguous and - assuming you avoid going crazy with namespaces - easier on the eyes of a developer, and much more easily parsed.
So what exactly was your gripe with XHTML?
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.
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
- Do you have iTunes on their Windows machine
Literally millions of people use a big chunk of Safari on Windows. It's the browser built into iTunes. It works today.
So arguably the quickest, most standards compliant browser around, which by the way is based on the open source
Blah. I was following this guy's argument until I came to this part. Are there seriously "millions" of windows users really using the iTunes browser ? That number seems a bit high given how many songs Apple has sold. Also, i'd challenge that Safari is even close to being the "most standards compliant browser" around. If you're working off a W3C checklist, I'd say Mozilla has it beat by a longshot, and makes a much more meaningful dent on the web applications side of things than Safari does, which is another big battle against IE altogether. I just can't believe that anybody really thinks for a minute that the whole future of the web and the battle of winning the hearts and minds of "millions" teeters on whether or not a browser supports CSS text shadows..-- Maciek
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!
Go back to old standards if you want. You'll be going there without the bulk of the world, the clueless people, the corporate CEOs, the spammers, the ...
... oh wait
... wait for me!
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
So briefly stated, this is likely to be tagged as troll or flamebait, but there's a lot of truth behind this.
It is inarguable that a lot of the best innovation in the history of any industry has been made by people who go outside current standards ("Here's to the crazy ones...") and build something that is the best that they can make it first, and worry about the other considerations later.
[Note that "best" can have many contradictory meanings: best in some narrowly defined performance criteria (fastest, highest, biggest, smallest, etc.), or broad appeal (most general utility, most sell-through), or most efficient, least polluting, cheapest/easiest to manufacture, etc.]
Sometime these evolve into "de facto" standards, and it can be difficult to turn those into "open standards" where there's a level playing field for others beside the first-to-market to gain traction.
As a response, there have been many efforts to develop standards in advance of actual product. In my experience (CAD interchange languages in the 70's and 80's, XForms today), progress on these standards is relatively glacial, and they are often passed over by the industry at large.
I submit that both approaches are good, and that we ought to strive for a healthy tension between them. This argues for moderation by those who cling to the "purity" of their ideals as circumstances change out from under them, and for a willingness to exercise enlightened self-interest and surrender proprietary advantage, vs. rapacious exploitation of current dominance. (We know who we're talking about here...)
To that end, I'd rather see some of the browsers take some risks in advance of accepted standards, at the risk (and expense) of requiring a few willing innovators to perform some extra work ("click here for a non-fizbin version of this site").
Just for a couple of examples, why not re-think where some of later innovations are supported? Can the concept of tabbed browsing by pushed up to the server, so a web designer can deliver a set of related tabs to the client? Could support of the portal/portlet structure be pushed into the client, so that the work of rendering and compositing a page full of portlets can be offloaded from the server, and servlets can execute more autonomously when appropriate?
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.
Read all the notes on w3schools.com, and use google religiously when you have questions. Also, be sure to look at the CSS source code on csszengarden.com, because it can save you a lot of time to learn through example. Keep it simple, too.
> I've managed to get my head around XHTML, but when I try to use CSS, I have trouble doing even the most basic layouts that could easily be achieved with s.
I had the same problem, until I ditched tables for div tags and css classes. Using the id tag is the key to getting layout right, and nesting your divs correctly will help too.
Start with one container div that holds everything, and that's your page. Give it an id class like: id="container", and in CSS, use the # symbol to identify it.
for example (in the CSS file or style tag):That would be for an id tag in your div: > I can understand why Slashdot still uses them.
They kinda have to at this point. The Slash system is too entrenched in HTML to change direction. Why? Because many comments would break XHTML, and there is no point using CSS without using XHTML, IMHO.
> With CSS, nothing seems to 'just work' on every browser. The W3C specs are confusing. And there's no decent HTML/CSS editor (as in the Dreamweaver kind, not the Vim kind) that I know of for Linux, so it has to be done by hand or elsewhere (Wine/Windows, et cetera).
I recommend doing everything by hand. You'll learn more and your code won't break as much, and you can quickly repair it if you know your system well. Or you could just download a package that lets you quickly post news to your site without having to change your templates every page. I've created one at sourceforge called Gemsites that will be releasing a 2.0 version soon, and while Gemsites used to be a Slash clone, it's now a standards compliant blog/photoblog package.
> What's the best way for a n00b like myself to learn and use CSS in the real world, where some people use Mozilla, some use Opera and Konqueror, and a lot of people use Internet Explorer?
Talk to people like me over email and I'll help you.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Would it be impossible to make web standards a browser plug-in? Something like an XML DTD that would be automatically downloaded every month and contained the lastest standards rules, so that all browsers would support the latest features as soon as they are published? Or maybe it's not as simple as that. Maybe there are rendering engine issues, etc. Still, it would be nice.
Where he errs, IMHO, is in the assumption that innovation will be incremental. He seems to be implying that the most we can expect from the future of the web are some (gasp!) cool new CSS features.
I beg to differ. The future of the web will ride on the wave of two related trends, both of which have revolutionary rather than evolutionary implications:
- Increased client computing capacity - back in the mid-90s it was all the average PC could handle to render a complex HTML page. Nowadays PCs are at least one order of magnitude faster, and a lot of the processing currently relegated to the server could be offloaded to the client. The reason that this hasn't yet occurred is that no browser has the appropriate plugin architecture. It is possible to develop plugins for major browsers, but there is no proper framework to integrate these plugins into a cohesive whole. Instead, an increasing number of networked apps are eschewing the web browser altogether in order to provide a better user experience (e.g. IM, P2P file sharing, online gaming, VoIP, etc.).
- XML - for all the hue and cry, the only significant impact of XML on the web since its inception 6 years ago is RSS. RSS is certainly cool, but it's just one XML-based language, and the whole premise of XML is that it enables the creation of multiple vocabularies. So there's a huge opening for someone to create a browser that intelligently processes XML vocabularies. This would include managing the relevant XML schemas (perhaps using a centralized repository), rendering the XML in various ways (perhaps including HTML templates and autogenerated forms) and persistent storage/retrieval. This is basically the goal of RDF, but besides taking what I consider to be a number of unfortunate design decisions, the RDF designers have essentially ignored the need for a new browser architecture to make XML use on the web an attractive alternative to HTML.
None of this is easy, of course. But considering the potential rewards of owning the new new browser architecture, I have no fear whatsoever that innovation will stagnate just because Microsoft decides to take itself out of the game for a while.Nonetheless, most of these applications would be that much more valuable if they were integrated together. To achieve this, a platform is needed that permits inter-plugin communication: a shared data model, a high-level framework for UI development and way for plugins to exchange messages. Think Eclipse for networked apps instead of development tools and you'll be on the right track.
Peer Pressure
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.
Micrsoft IS NOT going to use Mozilla, any hope that they will is just delusional.
Is far from true.
.Net thrives on it.
.Net framework. It can do everything you have expressed.
XML is integrated so deep into almost every technology available for internet development it is considered a ubiquitous skill for any level of developer.
WebServices are run by it.
Databases talk in it.
Office applications communicate with it.
Many large websites use it to render their entire sites.
And BTW the lofty platform/framework of which you speak is completed and needs only widespread adoption. It is the
blah
> 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....
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.
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