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W3C's Role In the Growth of a Proprietary Web
Paul Ellis writes "Mozilla's Asa Dotzler has said 'It's really hard for me to believe that either [Microsoft or Adobe] have the free and open Web at heart when they're actively subverting it with closed technologies like Flash and Silverlight.' But are they really subverting it? Where is the line between serving the consumer and subverting the Web? This blog post makes the case that the W3C's glacial process should share in the blame for the growth of proprietary technologies."
Just keep in mind, there's nothing stopping web developers from using straight HTML, CSS, JPG, PNG and GIF for basic animation. If you need media, you can embed an mpeg or a simple wav file. If you need processing, you can do it as CGI/server-side, at the same time ensuring 100% browser compatibility and avoiding the hijacking the web-client's CPU. Don't blame Adobe or MS or Sun for providing closed or deeply complicated, uncontrollable technologies; blame yourself for using them.
Flash no more "subverts" the web than Photoshop "subverts" image processing, or the GPL subverts how software is published. You want to use these things, that's your choice. There are other options available that are just as useful, and in some cases, more so.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The web without all this proprietary stuff would be so boring it would be unreal.
I really don't care who owns flash. All I care about is, can I watch it online and can I make my own content with it and own it. Thats yes and yes.
Problem solved.
As for W3C? They're out of date. They mutter about major players not using their standards, but the simple fact is, their version moves too slow. If we did things their way we'd have perfectly rendering web pages all the time, but the content they hosted would be so dull most consumers wouldn't be interested.
That's evident by the fact that not one of the major websites out there that I can think of (facebook, google, microsoft, and even the bbc to name a few) are fully W3C compliant. Add to this that barely anyone who clicks in gives a damn about this, and you have your answer.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
I agree that this article is complete flamebait. SVG is largely usable RIGHT NOW but MSIE have chosen not to adopt it for obvious commercial reasons. It could of course easily be fixed (perhaps the best practical way to do it is for governments to implement and enforce online accessibility legislation which would automatically force major sites to code to standards).
However, the article is completely right in denigrating the remarks of Asa Dotzler. IMHO he is completely overrated as a member of the Mozilla community. He was head of QA at the time of the appalling security REGRESSION in FF 1.0.4. He spends all his blog-time denigrating Opera and Safari instead of getting on with QA. He categorically denied the memory leaks in FF2 regardless of the evidence. It's fine to engage in advocacy but if you want to start being snide to opponents on technical grounds you should really be backed up with solid technical credentials instead of hot air. Fortunately he is no longer really engaged with the QA side of things, and is just a 'professional loudmouth'. PRO TIP: He is listed on feedhouse.mozillazine.org but not on planet.mozilla.org; the signal/noise ratio improves markedly if you subscribe to the latter Mozilla aggregator instead of the former.
It always amazes me when people call the W3C slow. As a web developer, there is one main thing holding me back. That is Internet Explorer.
Internet Explorer 8 is not yet released. When it is, it is likely that it will finally include support for CSS 2. This is one of the most fundamental parts of a modern web browser, and this specification was published over ten years ago.
The rise of JavaScript libraries like jQuery, Prototype, etc, was largely precipitated by the lack of support for DOM 2 Events in Internet Explorer. That specification was published in the year 2000.
The main draw for Flash has traditionally been the ability to use vector graphics. The alternative provided by the W3C, which is SVG, was first published in 2001.
The article complains that the last XHTML/HTML recommendation the W3C published was in 2001, seven years ago. What it neglects to mention is that even the next version of Internet Explorer, version 8, will not include any support at all for XHTML 1.0, let alone 1.1.
Can the W3C work faster? Probably. But how fast the W3C works is irrelevant, as they are not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is the rate of development in browsers, and one browser in particular, Internet Explorer. And it just so happens that the proprietary alternative of Silverlight is something developed and owned by the same company.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Don't forget that the W3C came up with a standard that included among other things a much better version of embedded images (the FIG tag), and even had a browser built demonstrating them (Arena), that demonstrated a clean browser-invariant mechanism for metadata, captions, and complex alternative content... and absolutely none of it was picked up by proprietary browsers. They were trying to specify stuff ahead of the implementations, and the implementers ignored them.
So now they're trying to coordinate things with the browser implementers, and what happens, they're going too slow?
...does that mean that Flash menus are ok now?
Who really owns something that you make in Flash? Just as when you write a document in Word, when you compose in a proprietary format, you hand the keys over to the vendor. You, and anybody who wants to view or edit what you've created, have to go through the One Software Company. And that's permanent; whatever DRM or platform decisions the company makes in the future will bind you as well.
Perhaps the fundamentalist notion that _everything_ must be free (as in speech) is just too extreme for, hmmmm, real people?
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy by the worst abuser.
... sells better to brainless consumers.
News at 11.
They both provide their own roles. I'd rather have standards done the right way then have a standard to be to push out shiny things done in a hurry before the next shiny thing comes out.
A libertarian shat on my carpet once. Claimed the free market would sort it out. -Ford Prefect(8777)
Being a web developer, what subverts the standard based web environment is the shoddy and inadequate, feature starved nature of the standards themselves. The standards often leave out some important and obvious capability that would make my life a lot eisier in designing web pages and applications. One example is the scrollbar controls in DOM, there was only a way to control the vertical scrollbar and a primitive one at that, but no way to control the horizontal one. There is also the deplorable situation where several essential features which have helped enhance the environment and make it more versatile and flexible, such as XMLHTTPRequest and InnerHTML are the various edit modes was not in the w3c specifications at all. There are also problems with the lack of any kind of dynamic font loading to use custom fonts in a web page. It almost seems the people who write the specifications do not actually use them in real world situations or the need for these would be more apparent. So w3c almost seems to be its own worst enemy when it comes to the brain damaged nature of the web programming environment.
I find it funny that someone (especially from Mozilla) blames the W3C for glacial process, when even Firefox 3 still doesn't have something as basic as box-shadow (with the "-moz" vendor prefix of course, since the spec is still a draft).
And Opera, which used to be the "latest" in W3C support (even draft), still doesn't support border-radius nor box-shadow in their latest version.
Like it or not, Safari is pushing W3C standards faster than Opera and Firefox combined.
As for Microsoft, they're still trying to kill the web in two ways: with extremely slow/buggy compliance with W3C standards and with proprietary crap like Silverlight.
Adobe has Flash and Air, which isn't really better except for the fact that at least they're trying to push their crap on many platforms, not only Windows.
Even Flash could be replaced on websites like YouTube if the browsers finally supported HTML 5's media tags.
Right on the mark.
SVG in particular is a sore topic for me. Half a decade ago I had an article in MSDN magazine (I considered the odds slim when I proposed it, and was startled when they ok'd it), yet that gorgeous vector technology still isn't realistically usable on the open web today, which is a bit of a travesty. Adobe's purchase of Macromedia pretty much sealed it as a fringe technology, given that Adobe was the one big proponent of SVG.
So if users actually _use_ it, why put the blame on Adobe?
Perhaps the fundamentalist notion that _everything_ must be free (as in speech) is just too extreme for, hmmmm, real people?
Here's an idea! Let's just assume that it'll always be zero-cost. Let's further assume that it'll always be available on any platform that anyone might like, rather than pushing people towards platforms that the vendor likes.
Now that that's out of the way, I can feel confident putting my content into this format, knowing that I, the content creator, <sarcasm>am in control</sarcasm>.
I there was a clean non-crashing FOSS alternative ( a browser plug-in maybe ) to Flash and the 'upcoming' Silverlight that both pleases developers and users alike it would be more popular than the others. No doubt about it.
Just keep in mind, there's nothing stopping web developers from using straight HTML, CSS, JPG, PNG and GIF for basic animation.
And what if they want something fancier than "basic animation"?
Flash no more "subverts" the web than Photoshop "subverts" image processing,
Apples and oranges. Images created in Photoshop don't need any special software to view. Content created in Flash does.
... or the GPL subverts how software is published.
On the contrary, GPL is meant to subvert proprietary software publishing. The difference is that the subversion is deliberate, and meant to open things up, as opposed to the closing off that Flash, which shuts things off, but only as a kind of side effect.
This is rather an old story. Back in 1995, back when Netscape was the biggest operator in a competitive browser market, they took a lot of flack for introducing non-standard features into HTML. And they didn't do it to "close off the market", they did it because they wanted to create web applications that weren't supported by existing standards, and weren't going to wait for W3C to bring the standards up to date.
Then we went through the whole thing all over with Microsoft and Internet Explorer. And because MS really was trying to control the marketplace, everybody ignored the role W3C was playing. And still plays.
CSS2 is still in the works. The final version has still not been published.
True, SVG should be a standard available on all browsers, but only FF supports it. Such a pity.
Perhaps we could do with OpenGL on the web instead. If we can now run C apps in the browser (:) ) then surely it'd be really easy to get going. Then you'd get some developers jumping ship and a whole new range of interactive web-based applications.
Gonna post this as AC...
For as long as I go and load some websites with Opera or Safari and get a warning message about using an unsupported browser, along with a huge "Get Firefox!" banner (or even wrong rendering or JS errors due to stupid Gecko bugs - event capturing, anyone?), Mozilla employees have no business talking about a free/open web and subverting anything.
At least Flash and Silverlight sites are browser and platform-agnostic.
There's a lot of zealotry when it comes to browsers. However, not once have I seen a website that doesn't work properly in Firefox and tells people to download Opera or Safari. The opposite is true more than any reasonable person should like.
The success of Firefox was great for the web. However, I would personally rather have an IE-only website than a rabid Firefox-fanboy-webmaster telling me to fuck off because my standards-compliant browser of choice isn't the same as his. Bonus hilarity points for those sad individuals who think the browser is called FireFox.
is there anyone among us who has been subverted by Silverlight ? I'd rather be subverted by my living room light bulb than Silverlight.
Read radical news here
Oh whatever. If you want to do everything in the kludgy, poorly-crafted alphabet soup hodge-podge of W3C standards, be my guest. Silverlight is too new to say, but the success of Flash is evidence of the failure of the open standards process to meet the needs of developers (and the businesses that employ them) in a timely fashion. Frankly, I suspect it will always be this way. The normal course of events is for private parties to develop new technologies and for standards committees to enshrine them in formal standards after the fact. Take for example C and C++ (or practically every other standardized programming language), which were standardized after they were successful languages. Having standards committees drive the process is the tail wagging the dog, and it's no wonder web technology is so far behind the curve that people get excited every time some feature as trivial as AJAX is added to browsers.
The fact of the matter is that it is still much harder to build a complex client-server application in a web browser than it is to use traditional desktop GUI tools. And given the pace of prior developments, the W3C isn't likely to change that while it still matters.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
HTML has had a tag for video, from the very beginning: anchor. <A HREF="blahblah.mpg">watch this video</A>
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Opera, Safari and Konqueror support SVG too. Internet Explorer is the only major browser that doesn't.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
So, I think the conclusion is that Microsoft extensions should be avoided and that the web developer community should demand standards compliance, and just require users to install Firefox until MSIE is no longer broken and useless.
However, proprietary extensions from other companies like Adobe seem perfectly fine to use. The problem comes when the OS, browser and extensions are all from one company.
virtual reality markup language. didn't think so
a standards body should be slow, not out front, writing standards for things no one knows will be successful or not
in fact, the commercial players SHOULD get proprietary, aggresive technologies out there, seeking new markets. let them play and crash and burn
then, after something proves successful, the standards body plods along and picks it up and makes it canon
the idea that the standards body should get out front, leads to standards being written for things no one uses. the idea that commercial companies won't try to capitalize on owning the technology presumes that corporations are interested in not making money. let a company write nonstandard tech. its a gamble for them, and could hurt them. let them get hurt then, and make space for things like firefox
so the whole basis for the story here is preposterous: ok, we have different browsers and competing platforms and different standards and proprietary tech. big. fucking. deal. get your head out of your anal retentive ass and deal with it
oh it takes 10 hours to program a page that should take 10 minutes to program were everyone fascistically devoted to standards? well then you wouldn't have a job genius. you wouldn't be needed. the mess you have to deal with is proof you are needed. if it weren't messy, you'd be downsized and replaced by a perl script
people who whine and bitch and moan about standards and noncompliance are motivated by the same shrill cloying need as grammar nazis. and if you understand why grammar nazis are essentially useless, annoying, and just don't get it, you understand whats up those who are so shrill about standardsthe world is a messy place. get used to it
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
True, SVG should be a standard available on all browsers, but only FF supports it. Such a pity.
Not true.
there's nothing stopping web developers from using straight HTML, CSS, JPG, PNG and GIF for basic animation.
What should I use for vector animation? Windows Internet Explorer still doesn't work well with SVG+JS.
If you need media, you can embed an mpeg or a simple wav file.
Like AVI, WAVE is a container that can wrap any of several audio codecs, including MP3. Which codecs more sophisticated than straight PCM are supported in most web browsers? And how can I indicate to the majority of web browsers how a particular MPEG-1 file or WAVE file should be synchronized to JavaScript-mediated animation? I don't know of any web browsers that are compatible with SMIL.
This is simply not true. The CSS 2 recommendation was published on the 12th of May 1998.
You may be thinking of CSS 2.1, which is a candidate recommendation. What this means is that it is ready to be implemented. In order for it to reach final recommendation status, there needs to be at least two interoperable implementations for every feature. To achieve that, browser vendors need to go ahead and implement it.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
I move along and therefore I don't see your content.
I refuse to purchase more bandwidth just because a few folks insist on using Flash and other piggish content.
I seriously doubt I'm missing anything other than larger ISP bills.
If there's one thing that's preserving the one last ounce of content on the web rather than flash-whizz-Web-2.0 useless crap, it's that it's really hard to get such a site working in IE and everything else.
Frankly, there is nothing useful in HTML that hasn't already been supported by all mainstream browsers for 8+ years. If you believe otherwise, then either:
(1) You're not interested in delivering content, just eye candy;
(2) You're not actually using HTML to markup documents, but to write "web apps". In which case, you get everything you deserve for using crayons to build an automobile.
CSS3 is still in the works. The final version has still not been published.
I had a music clip start playing when the surfer hit my site, with dancing Stroggs. If you held your mouse over one of the stroggs, Sonic the Hedgehog ran past with the Strogg trying to stomp him and succeeding on the second try. All this was done with .wav files, .gif files and javascript.
Which codec did you use for the WAVE audio? And how did you synchronize it to the GIF animation?
I blame Microsoft for the ad covering the top story on the front page of slashdot in IE because their browser won't do standards, but I also blame the site's authors.
Not everybody can afford to test in every possible environment. At what size of web site would you consider forcing the web site's operator to purchase at least three workstations, including one that runs Windows and one that runs Mac OS X?
CSS 3 is a family of specifications, not a single specification. Some of those too are at candidate recommendation stage, ready for implementing, just like CSS 2.1.
In any case, what's your point? I mentioned CSS 2 because it was published by the W3C a decade ago and its features are still not available to most web developers because Internet Explorer doesn't support it. How is the fact that the W3C carried on and started working on CSS 3 relevant? It still means the bottleneck is Internet Explorer, miles behind the "glacial" W3C.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
The best defence with digital media is to get your monies worth from the content, then archive it along with an application capable of opening it.
Some companies provide software as a service. If you stop paying for the privilege of using the software during any given period, you lose that privilege. Case in point: Microsoft has disclosed that it plans to offer Microsoft Office software under such conditions. If you were to create a project using a rented tool, how would you "archive [...] an application capable of opening" your editable project? Besides, how would you archive the operating system on which the editor runs, as well as the hardware on which the operating system and editor run?
Their bolding of the 3 was an indication that they were correcting figleaf, not you. Bizarre that figleaf has gotten upmods for such an incorrect "correction".
I really don't care who owns flash. All I care about is, can I watch it online and can I make my own content with it and own it. Thats yes and yes.
Not everybody has $700 for Flash. Relying on proprietary formats raises the entry barrier for people who want to learn a technology but do not qualify for academic pricing because they have already completed their formal schooling.
CSS2 is still in the works. The final version has still not been published.
Recommendation is as close to "final" status as you can get out of W3C. This page claims that CSS2 became a Recommendation in May 1998, over a decade ago. Or were you thinking of CSS2.1, which has been a Candidate Recommendation for a couple weeks shy of a year, or CSS3, which is still a Working Draft?
Photoshop exports to standard formats like PNG. Flash doesn't.
Maybe they worked fast but in the wrong direction. They focused on display without enhancing the form components. I remember that 7 years ago I wanted to implement a simple combo box (select + edit new value) and had no choice. Now is still the same apart from libraries that are doing workarounds.
Even now looking at the "Web 2 revolution" they are still focusing on stylesheets for display instead of looking for standards for interaction with the users and comunication with the servers.
From what I'm seeing they will still keep the old "presentation only" focus instead of starting making a standard for web applications.
CSS4 is still in the works. The final version has still not been published.
CSS5 is still in the works. The final version has still not been published.
CSS6 is still in the works. The final version has still not been published.
CSS7 is still in the works. The final version has still not been published.
CSS8 is still in the works. The final version has still not been published.
CSS9 is still in the works. The final version has still not been published.
CSS10 is still in the works. The final version has still not been published.
CSS11 is still in the works. The final version has still not been published.
This is a large paragraph full of useless text to get around Slashdot's annoying "characters per line" filter. It is generously padded with long lines of text to increase the average line length significantly over it's originally puny value of 19.0. Ideally, this paragraph will let me post the above comment. I certainly don't recommend reading all this, since it is intended entirely as filler content, like the other nine songs on a pop CD. This is fluff, like the fluff that drifts from the cottonwood trees, or spewed from major news organizations like so many soggy white drifts from an industrial snowblower. Really, I'm losing my mind writing this. Ok, lets try now! Nope, still not good enough. Right now I'm at 25.7. I'm really not sure where the cutoff is, so I'll just keep going. I gotta tell you, I honestly don't think the film rights to this whole saga are gonna be worth much: didn't Dumb and Dumberer tank? Seriously, SCO should move to California where things are already so far off their rocker that even McBride would fit in. One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish...A chicken farmer went out, one dark and windy day. He rested by the coop, as he went along his way. When all at once a rotten egg, hit him in the eye. It was the site he dreaded...ghost chickens in the sky. Ok, maybe that's enough drivel. I'll try posting again.
Yeah? And how did the situtation get like that? W3C was so fast and complete they got out in front of all the web demand so that Microsoft didn't have to go inventing defacto standards out of whole cloth? When W3C comes up with a platform to deliver complicated interactive animations, applications and HD video, then you can start complaining about silverlight. The IE pain is the result of a brief period where there was no strong pressure for unified standards. Hard to blame MS entirely for the world we all lived in.
Since when are authoring tools for SWF vector animations free as in beer? And since when are operating systems on which to run SWF players free as in beer?
and what is wrong with that? if i build a word processor with a proprietary format, i'm making a bet. i'm betting i will own the market, and everyone will be locked into my tech and become returning customers. if i lose the bet, i provide a greater incentive for someone not to use my product. its a dangerous and risky bet
in fact, it is why firefox exists. ie's nonstandard lack of compliance is exactly this kind of bet. and the frustration with ie led to the development and adoption of firefox. now ie's noncompliance works against them, and accelerates firefox adoption
so why do you want to fight the hubris with which greedy companies destroy themselves? why, in the desire to lock customers into proprietary formats, do you see a threat? i see an opportunity: customers hate being in a straightjacket. so shhhhhhhhhhhhhh... let the big corporations make their arrogant risky bets, and crash and burn. how many examples of sony time and time again coming out with some retarded proprietary standard and reaping nothing but venom?
so in your argument above about microsoft word, you are arguing for microsoft's continued existence. you examine a failure of theirs, and chastise them on the failure. in that failure, i see the seed of their downfall. so frankly, shut up and stop helping microsoft and sony and other big companies. let them fall on their swords. you can't stop geedy corporations from being hubristic and arrogant. nor should you if you want to see them fall!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Why does a webpage need to be able to screw with my scrollbar? Under what circumstance do I want the content that I'm viewing to be able to change how my viewer looks or behaves?
I'm visualizing horrible webpages that want to make my scrollbar bright pink and install 'comet cursor' on my machine...
new tech is an act of creation. it is try, and fail, try , and fail. corporations are motivated by profit to try, and fail. no one, NO ONE can get out in front of this messy process of new technology creation and write standards for it, because no one is omniscient about what isn't even in existence yet
the fallout of course is competing technologies as various companies get the hang of it. once upon a time, there were competing electrical grids, competing rail tie size, competing shoe sizes, etc. now, all that is standard. because it is about who wins the war of new tech creation. but during and shortly after the acts of creation, there is a mess to deal with, a babylon, and that's just part of the process. its inevitable, and its not by design or in the control of anyone to stop it
in other words, i understand your criticism of what you think my point of view is. but you aren't actually criticizing my point of view. you think it is possible to write standards for things that don't yet exist, and think i oppose it out of indolence, or something. no, i'm saying it is inevitable, this babylon, not superior
the mess is just part of what you have to deal with for being on the trailing edge of tech creation. it sorts itself out in the end. in the meantime, there is incoherence and pain. and you can't do anything about it. its inevitable
so just accept it. not because i'm messy, but because tech creation is messy. i'm not trying to convert you to my inferior point of view. i'm trying to tell you reality is inferior to your pristine standards. you're not rejecting me, you're rejecting reality. don't shoot the messenger
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
XForms 1.0, published by the W3C in 2003, includes this functionality, separates the data structure from the UI, and improves communication with the server. Good luck finding a browser that supports it though. Yet another case of the "glacial" W3C being blamed for browsers not keeping up with them.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
And then there's the fact that roughly 50% of the market browsing with Internet Explorer is still using an old version.
News report.
The Study.
Once Netscape's "air supply" had been cut off, Internet Explorer's job was done. Microsoft disbanded the Internet Explorer team, assigned the team members to different projects and discontinued development. Things remained that way for five years. That is why Internet Explorer is so far behind.
Microsoft was a member of the W3C working groups that developed and published these specifications. You'll find numerous acknowledgements to their employees in the specifications.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Both [Flash and Silverlight] have relatively low barriers of entry
Please see the response in this comment.
No established standards means developers might as well use one "standard" as another. Then we users constantly fight with browser incompatibilities, and having to install plug-ins, etc.
Thanks. Slashdot has a nasty bug where it nests replies incorrectly. It was displayed as a reply to my comment, which is why I was confused.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
just require users to install Firefox until MSIE is no longer broken and useless.
Grats, you just pissed off a significant portion of your users, who will now bear a grudge against you for ages (if they bother coming back at all). Now, you're perfectly welcome to stupidly alienate a bunch of users on your own sites, but don't be surprised if other people actually value their users.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
The whole IE-not-being-standards-compliant debacle started because the W3C was slow as hell back in the good ol' days. The market was screaming out for all kinds of functionality that the W3C had not even thought about, let alone come to some agreement on. How quickly the W3C works now compared to back then is completely different. Now, due to the fame the internet has, and how widely used it is, it HAS to be as quick as it currently is. Back in the mid-90s it was a different story altogether. IE started down its route because the standards of the day were horrifically lacking.
So if users actually _use_ it, why put the blame on Adobe?
They don't know any better.
If that sounds elitist, well... Oh, well.
Perhaps the fundamentalist
Here's a tip, boys and girls: whenever you see the word "fundamentalist", mentally replace it with "consistent". It's a quick way to clear up any obfuscation and propagandization.
notion that _everything_ must be free (as in speech)
As in Rights.
is just too extreme for, hmmmm, real people?
As opposed to the Fairies of Lalaland?
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
As opposed to the Fairies of Lalaland?
You must be new here.
Lots of browsers support it. Off the top of my head, I can only think of one browser that doesn't, and I've heard (not verified) that even that one can use it with a plugin, which makes SVG at least as deployable as Flash.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Just imagine how much less information we would have on the web if we weren't able to make sprites and words fly around like a bad theme park movie. HTML simply is no good at sharing knowledge.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
Gigantic incompatible specs like XForms are the problem, not the solution.
Meanwhile the W3C has never completely standardized the HTML Form object model found in every browser since Netscape 3.
It doesn't help that CSS2 is ridiculously complex, and CSS3 even more so. I think one of the things that kept IE back was that all the great open-source and power-user browsers that jumped on board to implement it, screwed up. Remember Acid2? Remember how it took until 2005 before ANY browser passed the test? And remember how the test designers realized there was a a bug in the test?
Now think about this: Acid2 only tested a few narrow aspects of CSS2 compliance. Who's to say there aren't more bugs that no one understands in the various gearhead browsers on the market?
You can't blame MS for that, only the W3C.
flash player has been available on linux for a while now.
The Flash Player EULA prohibits running the Linux + X11 + Firefox + Flash Player stack on any form factor other than a desktop PC or a laptop PC. Tablets are specifically excluded. Allow me to quote the relevant portion of the Flash Player EULA:
So to run Flash Player on a tablet PC, you have to use an out-of-print Microsoft operating system, not Linux + X11.
I move along and therefore I don't see your content.
I refuse to purchase more bandwidth just because a few folks insist on using Flash and other piggish content.
I seriously doubt I'm missing anything other than larger ISP bills.
1. Your loss.
2. If visiting a flash site makes a difference of purchasing more bandwidth and not, I would seriously contemplate your provider's service.
3. Same goes for the price of access.
ah, quite true. I sort of forget about other browsers :)
the plugin for the 'other' browser is no longer supported ("Please note that Adobe has announced that it will discontinue support for Adobe SVG Viewer on January 1, 2009") which means companies that rely on it are dropping support for it in favour of alternatives.
This is incorrect. Internet Explorer was held back by the fact that no developers were assigned to work on its rendering engine for five years. This began shortly after Internet Explorer 6 was released and is clearly the primary reason why it is so far behind.
At the time the development team was disbanded, Internet Explorer 6 had the best CSS implementation of any browser. It was only surpassed a year later by Mozilla. So as you can see, it's impossible for any other browsers' supposed failure to be responsible for Internet Explorer's dismal compliance with the W3C's specifications. It was already dead in the water by that point.
Even if the abandonment of Internet Explorer's development was preceded by an open-source failure of some kind, your claim is ridiculous. Microsoft aren't responsible for Internet Explorer being crippled, the other browsers getting it wrong are responsible for Internet Explorer being crippled? Despite being demonstrably far ahead of Internet Explorer in this regard? Really? What kind of Microsoft apologist do you have to be to say that with a straight face?
I'm sure there are. But since when does the lack of flawless implementations count against a specification? No software is without bugs.
Microsoft were on the working groups that published these specifications. You cannot blame the W3C without, in part, blaming Microsoft. You are keen on absolving Microsoft, aren't you? Microsoft helped create the specifications, then they failed to implement them while others did just that. The existence of bugs in other browsers does not absolve Microsoft from responsibility.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
It is like suggesting Video element but relying to Ogg/Theora to embed it, Theora is freaking VP3 , an abandoned codec. People choose between VP7 and H264 now. Also again, why was h264 the "evil" format too? Nobody knows.
Petabytes of lossy compressed data at Youtube will be transcoded to -3 major version behind compression codec because VP7 and H264 is evil closed formats. Yea, right.
Some has really lost connection with reality. They think everyone is getting hosted for free, they don't have to get advertisers, they don't have to get wages and every single person on planet has blocked the ads.
the eu is pretty good at shaking a big stick at that sort of thing
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You are absolutely right but here is the deal. You want to make sexy cross-browser web applications with no requirement for a plug-in you can do it now. You just have work with what you have. You deal with the bugs, ignore the features that are not supported in IE, and work around the ones that simply have different implementations. For example there are libraries that provide a common API for SVG and VML so you can get vector graphics. Many Web 2.0 apps support vector graphics on IE and Firefox. So let's stop the whining and get on with it. Oh I forgot that is what we are supposed to do here :-)
I always hated the fact that we have embedded flash applications to play Video.
But frankly, all browsers' handling of embedded MPEG's in sites were completely unusable. Especially that of Firefox on Linux.
It is very unreliable and unpredictably opening new windows.
I can always watch an embedded MPEG if I want to, but its always so damn difficult and annoying.
Flash may be annoying to install, but once installed, it works easily and reliably.
While MS is certainly glacial slow, developers deserve better standards than they've got, particularly when it comes to layout. CSS is a step above tables but it's still being used far beyond its scope. Even using it for a simple layout can be overly complex and counter-intuitive. Just look at the insanity it takes to get a proper CSS footer.
And the reason why a website needs to have complex animations or applications is...
Perhaps a web site exists for the sole purpose of exhibiting complex animations to the public. Examples include Albino Blacksheep, Newgrounds, and YouTube. How would you have built these sites differently?
Apples vs oranges comparison, or in this case, text vs binary. HTML is an open, text-based representation of document layout and text content. Flash also, as one of its many features, provides document layout and text content. The difference is that HTML is easily parsed and understood by *many* consumers; Flash has mainly one consumer at the client, and SWF content is not very easily parsed and understood outside of Adobe's plugin.
So Flash is opaque, relative to HTML. Yes, yes, there are some parsers, and Adobe has very recently committed to working with search engine companies to assist them in developing parsers. But look how long it took! The fact that Adobe has to actually assist a company the size of Google is a byproduct of the SWF format's opacity (and proprietary-ness.)
It boils down to text versus image data -- Flash deals in both. A website built around Flash is going to look more opaque to a consumer that wants to digest text, such as a crawler. Browsers entirely outsource dealing with Flash to plugins.
W3C is an organization supporting a distributed information system, the World Wide Web. In this realm, machine-readable information is king, while arbitrary binary content, such as the image, audio, video and motion data found in a SWF, is not easily understood by machines. The SWF format is primarily suited for human consumption - our computers mostly are capable of only playing them back for humans to view. That has much less value in an open information system, next to text.
That may be why the W3C is slow to pursue technologies similar to Flash. On the other hand, visual technologies like SVG and VRML are expressed with machine-readable text-based markup. More easily machine-consumed, therefore more support from W3C.
O lord, bless this thy holy hand grenade, that with it thou mayest blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.
Opera and Konqueror aren't major browsers. Safari can kinda pretend to be a major browser (with ~6 percent market share from the mac crowd) but let's not kid each other. CNN.com isn't having meetings to make sure that the Konqueror users are all happy.
It hurts whenever I read crap like that.
As if speed where the one thing that matters. "glacial"? Have you any idea what you're talking about?
When it comes to basics, standards or important things, then taking the time to get it done right is what differentiates the professional from the amateur. Sure, I can understand, I'm an impatient guy myself. But I'd rather wait 10 more minutes for my flight and be sure they actually checked the engines, or a couple weeks more for the next version of some software so they can do bugfixing - and speaking of which, software is a great example. How often have you been pissed that the just-released greatest new game X is buggy as hell? Guess what, that's because someone in the marketing department decided that they have to ship it now, no matter what state it's in.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
SVG? It wasn't until version 3 that Firefox finally introduced filtering to scaled bitmap images, and it only does it very, very poorly. What's the incentive to use Javascript to animate images when the final result will look like total crap compared to fully anti-aliased Flash content?
Firefox also wants APNG instead of MNG. If the browser is open source, why not support both? Is it really that hard without adding a ton of bloat, or are there that many political reasons for not supporting certain technologies in an open source browser?
People should use the right tool for the job
I will likely agree once you recommend a tool for the job of streaming interactive audiovisual works across the Internet.
Flash is only proprietary in the sense that Flash studio is written by adobe. Anyone can write a piece of software that creates an swf file. Some already exist.
Also, don't mix up "open source" and "web standards". Web Standards are put in place (eg XHTML) as a guide to site developers and browser developers to allow the browser to interpret the info from the site. Open source is any application where the developers allow anyone to compile/change/add to the code.
America, Home of the Brave.
I think the main problem about fonts is the one about licensing and royalties?
Fine, so ignore the fact that Opera, Safari and Konqueror all support it, leaving just Firefox as a major browser that does.
That still doesn't change the fact that IE is the only major browser that doesn't.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
You don't "have to go through One Software Company" to view Flash content. Check out Open Screen Project. The specifications for Adobe's Flash formats, SWF/FLV/etc, are available, and anyone can make a compiler or their own implementation of Flash Player. Your SWF content as it stands today is safe for viewing in the future and you never need to ask Adobe for software to view that content again. They may release new versions of the formats in the future, and maybe they'll decide it shouldn't be open anymore, but today's content will always be readable/writable.
It's scary being a Flash and Flex developer on Slashdot. You guys are unnaturally rabid.