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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."
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.
Not this bullshit argument again. I've never been stumped that someone "took away" a file format I was using. Ever. If we went down that route of not chancing it, the Web would appear much the same as it did in the mid-90s. Fuck that. If the choice is between closed source and no source, I'll go closed source 100% of the time. The internet is not a political protest, but a tool. You can choose to use it to display your ideologies if you want - most people just use it.