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."
The Standards Really Never Have Been the Standards (Score:3, Interesting)
The W3C has never really had complete control of HTML. Those who write the browser effectively can extend or cripple HTML features at will. Netscape added many new features [merlins.org] and everyone simply had to live with the results. IE did some nasty things to CSS and we all had to live with that, too.
Re:Those Who Ship Win (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
>>>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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.