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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.
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?
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.
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy by the worst abuser.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
CSS3 is still in the works. The final version has still not been published.
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
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, am in control.
Let's not buy cars either. The government could decide at any time that we aren't allowed to drive them on roads anymore! I realize that's not the best analogy, but to me it's on a similar level of paranoia.
Be honest here: 99% of what gets put on the web is not anything that anyone will care about in 5-10 years. It is not the end of the world if someone can't see the video of you chugging Diet Coke and Mentos in ten years. There are a million things more important in the world to worry about than whether or not Adobe will take Flash away from in some kind of scheme too insane for a Bond villain.
Further: while that kind of web technology doesn't have open source guaranteeing its freedom, competition in the free market is a good enough guarantee, again, for most if not all purposes.
I'm not talking about software, I'm talking about encoding my content in somebody else's format. Anybody's allowed to make whatever software they like to handle it in whatever way, and charge whatever amount, as long as the output is something I have the option of manipulating myself.
Here's your food and shelter analogy: if I'm eating a Wendy's hamburger when I write a book, my readers are not required to be eating a Wendy's hamburger when they read it. Similarly, if I'm writing in an apartment managed by XYZ company, reader's don't require a license from XYZ company.
That's not really an alternative to Flash movies, which are usually embedded in a page rather than linked to. The alternative to Flash movies would be <object type="video/mpeg"> , which was introduced with HTML 4 in 1997.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
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.
Well, there are a couple things about "compliance" to consider. First, because browsers don't always implement the standards fully or properly, you might have to use hacks to get everything to display properly in all browsers. Current web designers have to know browsers' bugs as much as the standards, so many web pages can't comply with the standards and render properly at the same time. That doesn't mean the standards are at fault. The inability to follow standards on the web is largely traceable to a single company which refuses to make a compliant browser.
But also, the real issue of standards is not to force everything into compliance at all times. It's to give a standard way of doing things so that people can expect certain things to be consistent. The point of web standards is so that I, as a developer, can write a web page in accordance with a set of rules, and then have a reasonable expectation that the page will display properly. It makes it so I shouldn't really have to worry about what browser the end-user has installed, because they should all display the page (roughly) the same way. If you wish to violate the standards for some purpose, that's fine, but then you should familiarize yourself with how that violation will effect various platforms. But, in fact, there are even standards about how formats should handle violations of the standard, and so even the violation may be... well... according to the standard.
But none of this explains to me why the standards would make the *content* of web pages "dull". If the content is interesting, the web wouldn't generally be dull. Relying on presentation to make your content exciting doesn't speak well for your content, and on the Internet, content is king.
If anything, it seems like the Internet wouldn't exist as it does today if the HTML standard hadn't been so simple and open. It allowed anyone with half a brain to make webpages and display their content. The ease with which individuals can create content is essential for the P2P "community" nature of the web. If not for that, it would be like TV-- pushed from big companies who have the resources and expertise to make it work. Even expecting someone to buy expensive software (e.g. Adobe Flash) in order to develop content would hurt the web immensely. The barrier of entry is much lower when the only necessary equipment for making content is a text editor.
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.
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?
The web without all this proprietary stuff would be so boring it would be unreal.
Really? Why. The vast majority of what Flash can do is standardized in SVG, SMIL and many other standards that Adobe and Microsoft studiously ignore. What do you do on the Web that is so exciting that it cannot be accomplished with SVG and SMIL? Of course there are things that Flash can do but SVG cannot and vice versa. But in general, all of the major Web app categories would be served just fine with SVG et. al.
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
HTML has had a tag for video, from the very beginning: anchor.
There are a few problems with using <a href="URI of video file">watch</a>.
First, no widely used specification recommends any specific Content-type for video that browsers SHOULD support. W3C tried to specify Content-type: application/ogg, but Nokia bitched. So all your users will see is "Windows cannot open this file. To open this file, Windows needs to know what program created it. Windows can go online to look it up automatically, or you can manually select from a list of programs on your computer."
In your code example, you recommend ".mpg", which commonly represents MPEG-1 video with MPEG-1 layer 2 audio. This codec isn't as space-efficient as FLV, nor does it have the vector animation capability of SWF.
An anchor link to does not allow the end user to interact with the video other than by fast-forwarding or rewinding. Even interactions comparable to DVD menus, which are straightforward to implement in something like SWF, have no counterpart.
Finally, some people who publish their video on the web want some soft security to deter people from downloading and redistributing videos and watching them out of context. SWF provides ways to obfuscate the FLV URL from casual users; <a href="URI of video file">watch</a> does not.
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
Which codec did you use for the WAVE audio? And how did you synchronize it to the GIF animation?
I don't remember what codec, LAME maybe. The audio was cut down to 11k samples per second, eight bits, and only about fifteen seconds long because most people were on dialup. It wasn't synchronized at all, but oddly it seemed to be.
Not everybody can afford to test in every possible environment.
If nobody ever had, Microsoft would have been forced to use standards. But using CSS is the problem here, since that's the standard Microsoft won't adhere to. If you use CSS you need to code for both Windows and standards.
Another thing webmasters do wrong is not understanding that you can't control exectly what your site is going to look like on every monitor at every resolution. Absolute positioning is begging for too much white space on some monitors and horizontal scrolls on others. Example, rather than <width 600 px> you should use <width 80%>.
CSS's usefulness is supposed to be so if you change your site's look you only have to change the style sheet rather than all pages. However, webmasters mistakenly use it to turn a markup language into a layout language, and as I said, layout only works when you can control screen size and resolution.
A site big enough that it can slashdot other sites should definitely be testing on all platforms.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
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.
So what you are saying is that the ideal way to handle this situation is to let all the cool kids go around wooing users with their awsum proprietary technologies, and that when they, the makers, are sufficiently entrenched in their monopolistic positions and we, the consumers and the users, are sufficiently screwed and without any real choice of products and vendors, we should rely on the ability of big supranational bodies to coerce the big boys into opening their standards?
You are saying that that is preferable over consensus and understanding, over standards composed by all the relevant actors (and some more ;)?
Nah, besides, how are we supposed to say then that Firefox has better rendering than IE, how will Safari fans slash their Opera and Firefox counterparts :)
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.