Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

W3C's Role In the Growth of a Proprietary Web

Posted by kdawson on from the slow-even-for-standards dept.

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."

4 of 228 comments (clear)

  1. The W3C has been burned, too... by argent · · Score: 5, Informative

    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?

  2. Re:W3C is own worst enemy by Bogtha · · Score: 5, Informative

    There are also problems with the lack of any kind of dynamic font loading to use custom fonts in a web page.

    The W3C put font loading into the CSS 2 specification over a decade ago. The browser vendors ignored it until recently. Now, ten years later, the browser vendors are starting to implement it, and apparently this means the W3C moves too slowly?

    --
    Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
  3. Re:The W3C? Glacial? by Bogtha · · Score: 5, Informative

    True, SVG should be a standard available on all browsers, but only FF supports it.

    Opera, Safari and Konqueror support SVG too. Internet Explorer is the only major browser that doesn't.

    --
    Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
  4. Re:The W3C? Glacial? by Bogtha · · Score: 5, Informative

    CSS2 is still in the works. The final version has still not been published.

    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