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Mozilla And Opera Team Up For Web Forms Standard
darthcamaro writes "According to an article running on Internetnews.com today, Mozilla and Opera have teamed up on a web standards proposal for Web Forms 2.0 to be presented at a W3C working group this week. One of the proposal's authors is quoted in the article as saying '... that if a backwards-compatible open-standards alternative isn't created first, then 10 years from now the de facto Web application standard will be Microsoft's Avalon and the .NET framework.'
Are Opera and Mozilla the new 'rebel alliance' in the fight against the Microsoft Empire? Should we call this chapter 'A New Hope'?"
Are Opera and Mozilla the new 'rebel alliance' in the fight against the Microsoft Empire? Should we call this chapter 'A New Hope'?"
Microsoft isn't the worst thing that's ever happened. In fact, simply creating a new web form system should be evidence that Microsoft is progressing, albeit slowly. Yes, developers should do all that is possible to prevent yet another Microsoft-dominated technology, but if Microsoft can put together a better product sooner, then take it and embrace it until a new technology comes along.
The Political Programmer
When ever I hear a story like this, it always comes back to MSN for me. MSN was not created by Microsoft as an application for the Internet. It was created as compitition (or replacement) for the Internet. They couldn't stand the fact that people would be using something they couldn't control. Anything you let Microsoft own will be to the detriment of the society as a whole.
/. is a bunch of nerds at a million typewriters. It's not a political conspiracy determined to undermine your beliefs.
I seem to remember a few antitrust lawsuits a few years ago, which never went very well for Microsoft. If Microsoft overextends itself again, I believe that judges around the nation will be more inclined to levy the same charges. Further, judges are growing, if slowly, more computer literate, and they therefore have a greater understanding of technologies and the implications of monopolies in the marketplace (or so we should hope, after years in the courtroom).
if Microsoft's legal machine is able to fend off liberal judges, then we have a real problem. However, Microsoft is being torn to pieces by the courts, picked off bit by bit. Like a hydra, it just won't die unless it loses all its heads, but I believe it's injured to a degree that it can't venture into new technologies, dominate them, and evade the law.
The Political Programmer
Surely if this chapter is A New Hope the next would be Microsoft Strikes Back and then The Return of Netscape 4? I don't think any of us want that.
Why is anything anything?
At this point, all Microsoft has to do to keep things proprietary is not implement the new standard. Why should they want to implement it when they can do some crazy com/.net solution that nobody can use except on a Windows PC?
That's where the competition comes in. A site may say, oh, you need a newer browser to view this properly. Well, Microsoft doesn't have it, so, um, sorry, use Mozilla/Firefox or Opera. As soon as people discover that IE is "broken", they become a lot more willing to switch away.
And then you have to get developers and whatnot to use your standard. An open standard has an advantage there, since -anyone- can do it without paying Microsoft.
On the other hand, IE -does- hold the upperhand, and web developers are always needing to maintain as much compatibility between browsers as possible (or, at least IE), so they might not use something most of the people can't use easily. So you definately have a point. It's not going to be easy to keep microsoft from exerting its market dominance
If Mozilla, Opera, and Apple get in on the act, that will be enough.
This new standard isn't the same as the rest of the web. In most cases it will be targeted and used largely for web applications, not web sites.
If you build a web site you have commercial pressure to ensure that it will be viewable in as many browsers and on as many platforms as possible. You can't have system requirements on a brochure.
If you build an application, people don't by default expect it to function on all platforms and browsers. People develop applications largely for single platforms, so that sort of focus can carry over reasonably smoothly to web applications.
Having said that, if it's implemented by all the above mentioned companies/browsers, then your application will gain immediate cross platform support, with users even having a choice of browser platform within their chosen OS platform.
I'm not talking about the current generation of web applications here, the likes of web mail (Hotmail, GMail, etc). I'm talking about the next generation, where the application looks and feels much closer to what we traditionally consider to be an application. That's where these standards are going. They won't feel like the web we know now, and won't be treated in the same manner.
So Microsoft can go off and do their own thing, and that's fine. As long as the other platforms have their equivalent technology, web application developers won't be left out in the cold if they want to build cross platform applications.