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