Slashdot Mirror
Trouble Brewing at the W3C?
An anonymous reader writes "A breakaway faction of the World Wide Web consortium (W3C) called WHAT-WG, or the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group--which includes Apple, the Mozilla Foundation and Opera--is threatening to revolt over electronic forms standards. WHAT-WG has announced its intention to submit the draft to the W3C, posing the potentially awkward possibility of the consortium advocating two conflicting avenues for Web forms. The fate of a standard could also determine whether the order form could be accessed in any standards-compliant Web browser, or if it would be available only to users of a particular operating system--an outcome that has browser makers and others worried about the role of Microsoft."
I find it very ironic that Mozilla, an organization that touts itself as standards compliant, is party to making new standards. Making new web standards, by the way, is something that Mozilla chastizes Microsoft for.
And now comes the expected name-calling. This is of course typical and makes me take anything you say here or in the future with a grain of salt, but I will put aside your childish behavior for the moment and reply to what you say, for the benefit of anyone else reading this. Whether Microsoft had a hand in the creation of HTML or CSS is beside the point, and has nothing to do with what I was talking about. The point is, there are many things, primarily with languages such as Javascript, in which Microsoft has deviated from the official specificiations, in many cases adding very useful functionality. While the W3C may include a few things here and there from Microsoft, this has mostly been because nothing fundamental was being changed to add it, and/or they had no such feature previously. As a result, you have people like the Mozilla Foundation who are so completely anal about specificiations that they adhere very strictly to how things should be, giving no room for error. This causes huge problems for the internet community, and results in many sites just not working correctly. Opera realized that following the standards to the letter like this was not a smart move, and because of their more open-minded attitude about everything, their browser is much more compatible with the web at large than Mozilla or Firefox is. So, like my original point stated, if we are to have any hope of creating a single standard for which the web can work with, the W3C is going to have to stop being so stubborn and accept more of these changes that Microsoft has implemented on their own. Not just additions, but changes to the languages themselves. Like in Javascript, allowing one to access an ID'd element in the page directly, instead of having to go through document.getelementbyid or document.images, etc. You can access SOME things directly in Firefox (albeit get warned for not following specifications), but other things you cannot. IE lets you access any ID'd thing directly, which is a very logical approach. Or you can use getelementbyid to try and be more compatible with Opera if need be. But even that function isn't as robust when you try to use it in Firefox, forcing you to use yet other methods to make your code work with it. Many of these standards are just not rationally implemented. One can argue that Microsoft had no place to create and change things in the first place, but the deed is done and the browser is dominant. If the standards and the people that make them want to remain useful, they're going to have to play catch up. I mean really, in this day and age, one should be able to do something as simple as rotate an image on a page without needing a plugin like Java or Flash. These kinds of things should be doable in the browser by now. But, only Microsoft has made such a thing happen. A very useful feature, which can't be taken advantage of to its full potential, because only IE supports it. So it doesn't matter how much money Microsoft puts into the W3C. It's certainly not working very much to bridge the gap in standards. Only the W3C itself can do that.