W3C's Role In the Growth of a Proprietary Web 228
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."
The W3C has been burned, too... (Score:5, Informative)
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?
Re:W3C is own worst enemy (Score:5, Informative)
The W3C put font loading [w3.org] 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?
Re:The W3C? Glacial? (Score:5, Informative)
Opera, Safari and Konqueror support SVG too. Internet Explorer is the only major browser that doesn't.
Re:Please (Score:3, Informative)
Propitiatory is what Jesus' sacrifice was for mankind (completely and exactly covered -- in this case, our sins).
Proprietary is when something is specific to a given entity - not open, not shared, exclusively owned by something.
Re:The W3C? Glacial? (Score:5, Informative)
This is simply not true. The CSS 2 recommendation was published on the 12th of May 1998 [w3.org].
You may be thinking of CSS 2.1 [w3.org], 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.
Re:The W3C? Glacial? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Please (Score:3, Informative)
Re:video (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Please (Score:4, Informative)
I think there are two different issues being talked about here. The first is, "Has W3C done a good job of maintaining and developing standards?" I'm very open to the idea that they could have done better. I've dealt with HTML and CSS enough to have a long wishlist.
The second question, very roughly, is "What's the deal with Flash/Silverlight?" Are they good? Bad? Helpful? Troublesome? I can see how people are trying to connect these two issues, but they really are separate.
If you just want to say that Microsoft and Macromedia/Adobe developed these formats and technologies because HTML/CSS/Javascript weren't good enough, that may be an interesting historical analysis. However, it doesn't address the question as to why these technologies and formats are closed/proprietary. Macromedia/Adobe, Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple, Opera, and everyone else could have joined together to develop and promote web standards other than those run by the W3C (like WHATWG). Hell, they could even develop technologies and formats to serve their purposes, and then open those formats in a way that allows other developers to create their own implementations (like what Adobe essentially did with PDF).
However, they've chosen to keep it all proprietary, and the intent is pretty clear: vendor lock-in. They want you to use their tools for development, their tools for display. In Microsoft's case, it has the added extra bonus that, if their format becomes popular enough, they can drop support for other operating systems and lock everyone into their platform.
And when you get down to it, these technologies don't really address a really great need. I've only seen a couple of good uses for Flash other than for casual games. For most of the content available on the web, HTML and CSS (flawed as they are) are better solutions.
Re:The W3C? Glacial? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Please (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Please (Score:3, Informative)
I am pretty sure XMLHttpRequest is a browser side feature, having written javascript code that runs on the browser that uses this feature, I am pretty sure this is the case. XMLHttpRequest allows you to have the browser start a connection to the server, for whatever reason, to fetch more data after a user generated event or something.
Re:Please (Score:3, Informative)
What the hell are you talking about? [microsoft.com]
Re:Agree, but... (Score:2, Informative)
They don't have to. If you write an ActiveX control and get it signed IE will ask users if they want to download it. You can see this if you get a fresh install of Windows and visit a web page with flash. Adobe do have an SVG ActiveX control.
Actually doing SVG with HTML is probably possible with this scheme too. Internet Explorer has an IWebBrowser interface so the SVG plugin could use that to render the HTML in a SVG+HTML page.