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."
Agree, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
The W3C? Glacial? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Please (Score:5, Interesting)
The key word there is BASIC. Complex animations, applications, and games are where Flash excels. Web Browsers did not provide sufficient facilities until recently. And only then because the browser makers got fed up with the W3C's stance that HTML did not need to be updated, and ended up doing an end run [whatwg.org] around their process. In result, most web browsers (except IE, surprise, surprise) support APIs for complex animations. They are also adding support for long term storage, sophisticated networking, predictable parsing, and other features that will greatly aid web developers.
This minor coup has not gone unnoticed by the W3C. In order to maintain the coherency of their organization, they went ahead and accepted HTML 5 [w3.org] as a working draft. The specification is getting top priority and is being handled in an open manner that is most unlike the W3C's business as usual. In other words, a win for both browser and web app developers. :-)
Re:The W3C? Glacial? (Score:5, Interesting)
Right on the mark.
SVG in particular is a sore topic for me. Half a decade ago I had an article in MSDN magazine [microsoft.com] (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.
"Get Firefox" (Score:0, Interesting)
Gonna post this as AC...
For as long as I go and load some websites with Opera or Safari and get a warning message about using an unsupported browser, along with a huge "Get Firefox!" banner (or even wrong rendering or JS errors due to stupid Gecko bugs - event capturing, anyone?), Mozilla employees have no business talking about a free/open web and subverting anything.
At least Flash and Silverlight sites are browser and platform-agnostic.
There's a lot of zealotry when it comes to browsers. However, not once have I seen a website that doesn't work properly in Firefox and tells people to download Opera or Safari. The opposite is true more than any reasonable person should like.
The success of Firefox was great for the web. However, I would personally rather have an IE-only website than a rabid Firefox-fanboy-webmaster telling me to fuck off because my standards-compliant browser of choice isn't the same as his. Bonus hilarity points for those sad individuals who think the browser is called FireFox.
Re:Please (Score:5, Interesting)
But don't you see this (coding for IE) as a separate issue (from Flash/Silverlight/PDF)?
I'm totally ticked off whenever I try to open a site that has IE-bug hacks that won't display in FF, or on my iPhone, or Mac. I generally try not to re-visit those sites... but it stinks because there's information out there that would be useful to me that I can't access because it's tied up in some odd display scheme that renders images over the text. (Yes, for really interesting things I could look at the page source, but manually ignoring HTML tags is a crappy way to parse information)
This is because I expect a "normal" page to render in a browser-agnostic way. (OK, "expect" is too strong, because I've been around a while now. But that's the way it SHOULD be). For a basic HTML page, no matter how it's built on the back end, I expect to get something viewable.
I see the Flash/Silverlight/PDF issue as separate, because it's usually (over)used for stupid stuff like an on-line "catalog" where you can actually "flip" the pages (horrors! an IRL metaphor gone badly wrong on the Web) or to do games or something else that is (to me) trivial. I mean, I'm not expecting to be informed by pages that have a 30-second Flash intro...
But that's just me, and I do see how the two issues are related to the problem of "proprietary" stuff on the Web.
Re:Please (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't blame Adobe or MS or Sun for providing closed or deeply complicated, uncontrollable technologies; blame yourself for using them.
But I don't use them and never did. My sites were all 100% HTML/Javascript/JPG/GIF. When Dopey Smurf decided to close his Quake site after graduating from medical school, I sent him a box of invisible rats as a going away present. Rats were his bane in med school; one supposedly dead rat came alive and bit him as he was dissecting it. His parting site mentioned the invisible rats and a link with "whatever you do DON'T click this link! PLEASE don't click this link!" When the surfer clicked the link, the invisible rats ate his web site.
Actually it took the surfer to my site, where a an animated GIF of his site being eaten by invisible rats ran.
I had a music clip start playing when the surfer hit my site, with dancing Stroggs. If you held your mouse over one of the stroggs, Sonic the Hedgehog ran past with the Strogg trying to stomp him and succeeding on the second try. All this was done with .wav files, .gif files and javascript.
This was all before the year 2000. I did all the "web 2.0" stuff ten years ago. Without flash or even CSS.
No, I don't blame Adobe or Sun or Microsoft (whose Silverlight has yet to subvert anything whatever), I blame clueless, lazy webmasters who can't make a web page by hand because they don't even know HTML. And I avoid their sites if possible.
Speaking of CSS, I blame Microsoft for the ad covering the top story on the front page of slashdot in IE because their browser won't do standards, but I also blame the site's authors.
Re:Own it..? (Score:2, Interesting)
"Who really owns something that you make in Flash?"
You do.
"Just as when you write a document in Word,"
Yep still you
"when you compose in a proprietary format, you hand the keys over to the vendor."
Gnash for Flash and save as RTF for Word.
"You, and anybody who wants to view or edit what you've created, have to go through the One Software Company."
Umm no. At least not when it comes to Word.
I am no fan of flash but grand sweeping false statements make my feet itch.
Macromedia has documented FLASH and gnu is producing a flash player.
RTF works at least a bit for document exchange.
Re:The W3C? Glacial? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Erm... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Erm... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Since when? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:video (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [ietf.org] support. W3C tried to specify Content-type: application/ogg, but Nokia bitched [slashdot.org]. 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 [wikipedia.org] 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.
Re:Please (Score:3, Interesting)
There is absolutely no reason that the web should be turned into an application deployment platform
The ubiquity of web browsers and the broad support for http including the many caching solutions seem like two valid reasons to me.
and doing so completely undermines the purpose and nature of the web.
Which is what, exactly? And why is your degree that which determines its purpose? And actually, its nature is that there are a bunch of fileservers out there which will often spew data at you if you ask for them by name... and little more than that.
The reason that search engines work is that websites, as created with HTML, can easily be indexed and understood by computers. Hypertext is about linking documents -- DOCUMENTS -- together.
Interestingly, web servers have pretty much always allowed you to serve arbitrary content. At least, as long as they've been available to the public.
Things like forms make sense in that context: a form is a document, right? CSS makes sense too: it formats documents. Documents sometimes have images in them; PNG or SVG make sense for that.
HTML and CSS are special because our browsers know what to do with them. But if they don't know what to do, you can still save the file.
Now, where does Flash fit into that? Flash is an application runtime environment, and is really good for multimedia programs.
Debatable.
An program is neither a document nor a part of a document.
A CGI is neither a document nor an application.
DHTML is neither simply document nor application.
It would make more sense if your Flash website had a hyperlink to a Flash program, which would be opened by the runtime in a separate window -- without a back button, a forward button, or an "up" button (as some browsers have), without the confusing and paradigm breaking nature of embedding applets.
A page is just a container for some content. A flash applet is some content. Flash applets can be searchable, indexable, and accessible, or not. Flash is not inherently evil and the web makes perfect sense as an application delivery platform because practically everyone has a browser now.
Re:Please (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes. Can you imagine the madness if millions of people were to abuse the web to make it their primary way or reading email, posting content online, listening to radio shows, watching television shows, or playing amusing little games? It would be the end times! Sheep would lie down with lions! Web browsers would lie down with email clients! No, I like my web nice and static, just like paper documents! We should not only do away with this newfangled Flash, we need to be rid of that JavaScript! And don't forget web forms; be rid of the demonic things! Right after I post this, I'm going to patch my version of Firefox to suppress display of input and submit tags!
Yes, Flash and Silverlight are problematic. But the web is a highly effective application deployment platform and has been for years. Hell, you're posting on a discussion group application; a regrettably crude replacement for Usenet and dedicated newsgroup readers. While you're yelling at the kids to get off your lawn, the rest of the world is communicating, getting work done, and having fun on the web.
Re:Please (Score:2, Interesting)
What really pisses me off is when hardware with web access (i.e. my dsl modem) can't render properly under Firefox. WTF? I have to drop back to IE just to get everything displaying properly. There's absolutely no excuse for using fancy tricks in a damn administration console. If anything should be browser-agnostic, this is it!
This is a case of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. If you use basic HTML+frames+gif/jpg graphics+forms it's quite easy to make a web page that works on everything from IE3 and text based browsers/crippled html viewers on mobile phones to the latest Opera/IE/Firefox. I worked on a system for booking hotel rooms about ten years ago that would use Javascript for field validation on modern browsers (back then this meant IE4 and Netscape) and skip javascript completely on everything else. It still worked though, because the form validation was duplicated on the server. The difference was that on a modern browser you saved a page reload. But the web pages was still usable on Lynx for example, or on IE3 over a 56K modem.
If you use bleeding edge CSS it will only work on Opera and Firefox and if you use IE specific stuff it will only work on IE. But you don't need to use either - people built quite usable web pages (more usable than Web 2.0 stuff IMO) long before any of this stuff was thought of.