The Abdication of the HTML Standard 298
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."
Those Who Ship Win (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [slashdot.org]:
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 [chromeexperiments.com] 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.
HTML *was* simple (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Those Who Ship Win (Score:4, Insightful)
Gee, that sounds like - a De Facto standard. Like MS Word .doc format! Guess evil is in the eye of the beholder.
Re:"not a truly independent standards process" (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Those Who Ship Win (Score:2, Insightful)
While I hate eldavojohn as much as anyone, I don't see anything in his post that was saying this fact is 'good' or 'evil', just that it's a fact. And honestly, he's right. If you design by independent committee, that committee needs to move at the pace of development or it will be ignored. If software companies are putting out releases faster than the committee is putting out standards, then the committee is worthless. This is ultimately the reasoning behind the move to non numbered releases, as it at least gives the standard a chance in hell at succeeding. You can't expect companies to slow development to wait for some voluntary, independent group to tell them what they can and can't code, you need to speed up the group to match the developers.
finally (Score:2, Insightful)
Finally, people are starting to realise (and argue) that today's HTML is no more "open" than Flash. It's just a cartel between a few major tech companies to promote particular implementations of particular technologies in their medium term interest. Apple's canvas is the most obvious culprit. Rather than freeing people from Flash, it gives such a seductive but incomplete alternative (to an already subpar platform) that developers are encouraged to write native Cocoa apps. It's msjvm deja vu all over again.
Bad Thing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey! At least a certain monolithic juggernaut ISV that is known for hijacking ALL standards isn't in the top four.
Re:HTML *was* simple (Score:0, Insightful)
It was never OK to use a b tag for anything that didn't explicitly need to be BOLD, rather than emphasised or standing out strongly. Table layouts were never OK either. The move to CSS and that whole separation of content from layout was a great move.
You can't teach your parents to edit HTML now that it's entirely about putting in content and logical headings? If not, you're teaching the wrong thing. You grandparents should NOT be trying to learn how to make fancy websites before they know how to make websites.
Could be worse (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:HTML *was* simple (Score:2, Insightful)
Any HTML your grandparents wrote 10 years ago still works fine today, so what are you complaining about?
If anything, HTML5 represents a shift back towards the 'vernacular' - for example, the B tag is officially a-ok for bolded text.
Re:Those Who Ship Win (Score:2, Insightful)
While I hate eldavojohn as much as anyone ...
Seriously, why do I even bother with this site?
Re:Those Who Ship Win (Score:4, Insightful)
ODT is as much of a de facto standard. If you give me an ODT file that conforms to the standard but triggers bugs in OpenOffice.org, what good is it? I'm not going to spend days setting up an OOo build environment, learning whatever awful framework they use, and bisecting this bug in order to read your few paragraphs.
The problem with .doc is not that it's a de facto standard -- all standards that are worth anything must be de facto at least as much as they are de jure -- but that it's a bad one, because it's hard for any program that doesn't share MS Word's internal data structures and algorithms to implement (because a .doc is, to first order, a memory dump of Word's data). HTML doesn't work like that, and it's hard to make it work like that if you tried.
patents, MS (Score:5, Insightful)
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. [dessci.com]
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:Those Who Ship Win (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, why do I even bother with this site?
Because you know that the majority are both more temperate and less vocal than the baseline stupid douche?
Re:Those Who Ship Win (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
Nothing wrong with de-facto standards, if they're fully open.
Look at e.g. the Python programming language. The CPython implementation is the de-facto standard implementation, and the language specs actually refer (or used to) to the implementation saying if in doubt, that implementation wins.
Yet there are other, mostly compatible Python implementations out there, and nothing - not patents, nor secrets - stops you from starting a new one.
Re:Those Who Ship Win (Score:5, Insightful)
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:HTML compliance is for wankers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:finally (Score:4, Insightful)
Regardless of who is setting the standard, it *is* an open standard, implementable by anyone who reads the spec. Flash is not. Big difference.
Re:HTML *was* simple (Score:3, Insightful)
We replaced B with STRONG and I with EM which are effectively the exact some thing. If you think its different, sorry you're confused.
Tell me why exactly we needed to change tags?
Explain to me how change the name of a tag from B to STRONG actually made it so your screen reader worked better. I'm pretty sure if it knew the difference between B and STRONG it could do whatever it want with text and wouldn't care if the tag was B or STRONG.
Some douche's in a commitee sat down and decided the B was a display thing and STRONG was a speech thing and they are different and should be handled as such ... except ... they are used for the exact same thing. Same with EM and I.
An intelligent solution would have been much simpler ... 'when people use B they mean to make that part strong and stand out, lets treat it as such.' instead of 'hey, lets create a new tag, that is visually identical to B out of the box, but has a different name, so that way we can identify it ... unlike bold where we have no way to identify it at all!'
EM and STRONG are shining example of retarded changes to a protocol because some people involved in the discussion don't have a clue.