Mozilla, Opera Form Group to Develop Web App Specs

An anonymous reader writes "MozillaZine is reporting that the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software have formed a working group to develop specifications for Web applications. The new Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group is working on specs for Web Forms 2.0, Web Apps 1.0 and Web Controls 1.0, among others. This is being done outside of the W3C, with the hope of getting a viable alternative to Longhorn's XAML available soon. Another reason for working outside the W3C could be the rift between Mozilla/Opera and other W3C members over what technologies Web applications solutions such be based on: Mozilla/Opera favour a backwards-compatible HTML-based standard, others are looking towards to XForms and SVG. It will be interesting to see if any other browser developers jump on board WHATWG." This story builds on our recent story concerning the group.

Comments

This is great news.

[gusnz]

An alliance is exactly what they should be doing. Well, ideally it would be under the auspices of the W3C, but it's a great start.

The reason is XAML. Microsoft has basically thrown in the towel with its (X)HTML rendering engine (the last release, IE6, was three years ago, and the differences from IE5.5 were not huge -- it still doesn't support stuff like translucent PNGs and much of CSS2). When Longhorn is released, expect a massive push towards the use of their proprietry XAML for web application deployment tied with their .NET development tools.

If Mozilla, Opera and hopefully Safari (which shares a few key developers with Mozilla and is implementing the Mozilla XUL box model in places) can push open standards and hopefully get a combined ~20-30% desktop share in the next 5 years before Longhorn is released and becomes semi-ubiquitous on the desktop, they'll be a large thorn in MS's side. Major businesses won't be able to ignore them, and with their focus on backwards-compatible specifications that expand upon existing CSS/JS/DOM technology and degrade well in older browsers (unlike XAML), they'll be the new default for client-side developers.

So start pushing those copies of Firefox onto friends' computers once v0.9 is released in a week or so with its auto-update notification. The more people who are aware that "web browser" does not equal "the blue 'e' icon", the better...

Failure forseen.

[deragon]

Mozilla and Opera creating new unoffical standards? If IE does not implement them, they will be simply ignored. I cannot forsee business implementing web services designed for these standards which will only be working for Mozilla and Opera users. What is the market share for the two? 5%?

Its time for goverments to step in and force standards. The Internet must remain open and interoperability is essential.

They need Google

[tdvaughan]

Google would be a hugely useful partner in this effort. If they implemented future versions of GMail according to these standards rather than XAML/Avalon their dominance in the internet would make the difference between success and getting steamrollered by MS when Longhorn comes out.