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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.
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.
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
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