The Abdication of the HTML Standard

GMGruman writes "The end of numbering for HTML versions beyond HTML5 hides two painful realities, argues Neil McAllister. One is that the HTML standards process has failed, becoming a seemingly never-ending bureaucratic maze that has encouraged the proliferation of draft implementations. That's not great, but as all the wireless draft standards have shown, it can be managed. But the bigger problem is that HTML has effectively been abandoned to four companies: Apple, Google, Opera, and Mozilla. They are deciding the actual fate of HTML, not a truly independent standards process."

Comments

Those Who Ship Win

[eldavojohn]

But the bigger problem is that HTML has effectively been abandoned to four companies: Apple, Google, Opera, and Mozilla. They are deciding the actual fate of HTML, not a truly independent standards process.

This reminds me of something that was promoted in a book I reviewed:

those who ship win

It's that simple. If this armchair talking head who wrote this article chastising the standards process were to magically code up a browser that better empowered me, a software developer, to deploy code to users that ran to my satisfaction then his standards would be realized first. And I might be tempted to use it and ask my users to use it so we can get good functionality.

Duh.

Back when the standards were still in flux (and still are) I was using Google Chrome to enjoy an Arcade Fire experiment that used many HTML5 elements. And guess what? I started using Chrome and the implementation of their perspective of the standards gained just a planck constant more marketshare.

This guy can sit around and complain all he wants but for better or for worse: those who ship win.

Re:Those Who Ship Win

[Saint Stephen]

Gee, that sounds like - a De Facto standard. Like MS Word .doc format! Guess evil is in the eye of the beholder.

Re:Those Who Ship Win

[rjstanford]

Yes, yes it is.

The difference being that the group behind the de facto standard sees high value in being consistent, predictable, and having that pseudo-standard very well documented, because without those facts nobody can create content for them to consume.

With the .doc format, there's high value to Microsoft in obfuscating the "standard" documentation as much as possible since they both create and consume the documents.

Big difference.

Re:Those Who Ship Win

[theaveng]

>>>HTML has effectively been abandoned to four companies: Apple, Google, Opera, and Mozilla.

Sounds like a lot of FUD to me. It used to be:
- 1999 and earlier: No HTML standard existed and Mozilla Netscape just willy-nilly added new features (blink tag for example).
- 1999 and later: Ditto Microsoft once their IE became dominant. IE5 and 6 were browsers that complied with nothing, and even today still cause problems for web designers.

Better to have four companies talking to one another and hashing-out HTML5 and HTML6, rather than the old (a) chaos of Netscape producing non-compliant features or (b) Monopoly of MS-IE. We don't want to have another Format war like HD-DVD v. Bluray on the internet. We want consensus first, even if that slows progress a little.

Re:Those Who Ship Win

[morgauxo]

So, if I made a browser that used a flavor of html which made your job easier you would automatically begin coding your html for it? Really? And who would your customer be?

The sad thing for web developers is that it doesn't matter whose html standard is techically better or which one better enables development. It's which one/ones are being used by your target audience that matter. Otherwise you are coding a site just for yourself! It really comes down to a browser marketing issue, not an html standards one. Whoever markets their browser better gets to set the standard.

Re:Those Who Ship Win

[gig]

It's nothing like Word get a grip.

Apple created canvas, submitted to W3C, Mozilla submitted changes, canvas was standardized, then Apple invested significant engineerig resources into changing their canvas implementation to match the standard.

If you want an academic standard with no real world use, XHTML 2 is available for your masturbatory needs. The Web needs a practical HTML standard that documents how you DO write HTML, not how you theoretically SHOULD write HTML.

Re:Those Who Ship Win

[gig]

It's not 4 companies, that is BS:

1) in this context, Apple is the WebKit open source project

2) dozens of vendors use WebKit, including Google, and there are many contributors

3) Mozilla is a foundation

4) Microsoft and Adobe are also part of W3C, although they sometimes had to be dragged kicking and screaming, but that just shows that standardization works

Re:Those Who Ship Win

[jc42]

Having browser makers defining the "standard" is the mess we needed to get out of in the first place. What, do we want to return to browser makers making up things as they go along, like goddamn IE?

There's a long history to this that explains it fairly well. The concept of a "standard" was invented to handle the problem that vendors have always cheated customers by having their own definitions for units of measurement. Thus, food seller have always tried sell a "pound" (or whatever the local weight term was) of produce that was short weight.

Governments finally blocked this by making legal definitions of such units of measurement, and prosecuting vendors who used a unit that was different from the standard. This is, historically, the only thing that has ever worked. Anywhere in the world, if you sell, say, 200 grams of meat or rice, and it only weighs 180 grams, you will be found guilty of consumer fraud. If you try to say that you use your own definition of a gram, that statement would be used in court to show that your fraud was intentional. (There are occasionally parts of the world where such things aren't enforced, and the result is always the same: Vendors start cheating their customers.)

The real problem here is that HTML is not actually a "standard". That is, it has no force of law behind it. Any vendor can violate it at will, call their product "HTML", and have no fear that the government standards body will prosecute them for consumer fraud.

The phrase "de-facto standard" is in fact a statement of knowingly committing consumer fraud. It should lead to prosecution. But it doesn't. That's the real reason that we have such problems. If we had an actual HTML standard, enforceable in court, we wouldn't have such problems. (Actually, we'd still have them, but they'd lead to prosecution. ;-)

How has backwards thinking like this become so prevalent in modern technology? I don't get it.

It's because "When a computer is involved, all precedent is forgotten, and everything has to be relearned." I've forgotten who said that, but it applies here. The computer industry uses the term "standard" for things that aren't standardized at all. Vendors can freely claim their products "standard" when they don't follow any actual standard, without fear of prosecution for fraud. We have "industry standards" bodies like W3C that have no enforcement power, and thus aren't actually defining standards. They are merely defining pseudo-standards, marketing terms that vendors are free to violate at will without fear of any legal consequences.

The entire history of commerce tells us how vendors will behave in such a situation. They'll define their own "standards", using the same terms as the published pseudo-standards such as HTML. They'll do this knowingly, to persuade the public to buy. Without any legal enforcement, they know they can get away with it.

If we want an actual standard for HTML, it has to have legal import. Without this, vendors will continue to behave as they've always behaved. But there is no sign this is being considered, here in the US or in any other country.

So any HTML "standard" is just a pseudo-standard, a marketing term that vendors can violate at will. We can discuss it all we like, but this will have no effect on the vendors. The only way this can change is if government get involved by having their standards bodies declare actual legal standards that are enforced. We have millennia of experience showing that this is the only approach that actually gives us a useful standard. Computers haven't changed this fact; they only led us to ignore it and then complain that vendors are violating a "standard". Of course they are; they're vendors who are trying to sell us something, without any legal constraints on their use of terminology.

HTML *was* simple

[drumcat]

Remember when it was ok to use a "b" tag, and no one scoffed? How about table layouts? It's funny, the new standards aren't always better. This is why a format "of the people" isn't going anywhere. I could teach my grandparents how to edit HTML 10 years ago. Now, not so much. Is that better? I'd argue, no. It's not that editing is hard; it's not. The problem is that we're turning the browser into an application-level container. HTML should be more focused on making layouts easier, and faster. It should not be focused on animation. This is where MS Word has fallen off a cliff. If you want more adoption, focus HTML on what actually is important - layout that's understandable to the masses.

Re:HTML *was* simple

[Rui Lopes]

Remember when it was ok to use a "b" tag, and no one scoffed? How about table layouts? It's funny, the new standards aren't always better.

1. 1) Download the NVDA screenreader
2. 2) Learn about the problems induced with your comment
3. 3) Spread the word!

If you still think it's actually not better, sorry, but you should have 10 blind persons hit you with their canes...

Eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

HTML has effectively been abandoned to four companies: Apple, Google, Opera, and Mozilla.

And Microsoft is where?

Their Internet Explorer is used by most Internet users today ( http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0 )

Re:Eh?

[KingMotley]

They are still there. The article just fails to mention them. Microsoft has contributed a LOT to the HTML 5 specification process. A very large number of test cases were submitted by them, and they contribute during the discussions as well. It's just the author obviously has a very anti-microsoft bias. And for the purposes of the article, the lack of any one company doesn't really matter the principle remains the same.

Re:"not a truly independent standards process"

[Waffle Iron]

Isn't that par for the course? It seems a lot of standards are driven by a few big players who have a strong interest in it.

True. When I read the summary, I thought that four players seemed better than the early days of the web, when HTML was driven by just the pair of Netscape and Microsoft.

Bad Thing?

[ArhcAngel]

Hey! At least a certain monolithic juggernaut ISV that is known for hijacking ALL standards isn't in the top four.

Could be worse

[Thelasko]

At least the standards aren't determined by Microsoft.

patents, MS

[bcrowell]

It seems to me that everybody is moaning and groaning about what a bad job WHATWG is doing, when in fact WHATWG is just doing the best it can in an extremely difficult environment created by patents and Microsoft.

The confusion with respect to audio and video codecs only exists because of patents. A certain patent-encumbered codec shows up that's good enough, so it gets widely adopted, and then it's impossible to displace it because of network effects. This is not WHATWG's fault.

The html 5 feature that I really care about is mathml, and here it's very, very clear that MS is the bad guy and W3C and WHATWG have just been trying, unsuccessfully, to work around MS. Mathml worked fine in xhtml years ago, but MS never bothered to support xhtml in IE, which would have been technically trivial to do. They stated that their policy was to have independent vendors supply support for mathml rendering via plugins, and Design Science did their best to do that, but MS made it impossible for them to do that in a standard way, because the standard depended on xhtml, which IE didn't support. So xhtml died in the crib, and WHATWG decided to pour the svg and mathml namespaces into the flat html 5 namespace. Kind of an ugly solution, but they had no other choice. Now for the first time it is theoretically possible to write a web page coded in a standard way that has mathml in it and that might render properly in some future version of IE. But meanwhile big institutions are still sticking to IE 6 because they need compatibility with all its bugs, and preview versions of IE 9 have broken mathml support.

The big problem is that commercial entities have interests that oppose the interests of their customers and internet users at large. MS wants users to be locked into their browser through proprietary plugins and bug-compatibility, and they don't stand to profit by supporting features like mathml, which are only used by a relatively small proportion of their users. (Never mind that blind people can access mathml but not bitmapped renderings of equations. Blind people aren't economically important to MS.) Owners of patents on codecs want to harvest licensing fees, and they don't care if that screws everybody else up and makes a mess out of audio and video on the web.

McAllister complains that WHATWG is dominated by a clique consisting of Google, Apple, Mozilla, and Opera. But that clique is basically a list of all the browser vendors, and doesn't that kind of make sense? These are the people who acually need to implement the standard, so of course they should be the ones with the most influence. The only browser vendor missing from the list is MS, which is only interested in subverting standards.

Re:HTML compliance is for wankers

[Stooshie]

Remind me to never hire you for a project. You sound like you are a nightmare to work with. I suspect you have never worked on a real site that needs to be used by a wide range of people across a wide range of circumstances. Blind people, colour blind people and people with upper body problems have to be able to pay online for their council tax, apply for planning permission etc.... Standards are vitally important for that.