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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!
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.
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!
steal this sig
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
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/
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 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.
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.