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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."
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
The key word there is BASIC. Complex animations, applications, and games are where Flash excels. Web Browsers did not provide sufficient facilities until recently. And only then because the browser makers got fed up with the W3C's stance that HTML did not need to be updated, and ended up doing an end run around their process. In result, most web browsers (except IE, surprise, surprise) support APIs for complex animations. They are also adding support for long term storage, sophisticated networking, predictable parsing, and other features that will greatly aid web developers.
This minor coup has not gone unnoticed by the W3C. In order to maintain the coherency of their organization, they went ahead and accepted HTML 5 as a working draft. The specification is getting top priority and is being handled in an open manner that is most unlike the W3C's business as usual. In other words, a win for both browser and web app developers. :-)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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.
But don't you see this (coding for IE) as a separate issue (from Flash/Silverlight/PDF)?
I'm totally ticked off whenever I try to open a site that has IE-bug hacks that won't display in FF, or on my iPhone, or Mac. I generally try not to re-visit those sites... but it stinks because there's information out there that would be useful to me that I can't access because it's tied up in some odd display scheme that renders images over the text. (Yes, for really interesting things I could look at the page source, but manually ignoring HTML tags is a crappy way to parse information)
This is because I expect a "normal" page to render in a browser-agnostic way. (OK, "expect" is too strong, because I've been around a while now. But that's the way it SHOULD be). For a basic HTML page, no matter how it's built on the back end, I expect to get something viewable.
I see the Flash/Silverlight/PDF issue as separate, because it's usually (over)used for stupid stuff like an on-line "catalog" where you can actually "flip" the pages (horrors! an IRL metaphor gone badly wrong on the Web) or to do games or something else that is (to me) trivial. I mean, I'm not expecting to be informed by pages that have a 30-second Flash intro...
But that's just me, and I do see how the two issues are related to the problem of "proprietary" stuff on the Web.
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