W3C's Role In the Growth of a Proprietary Web

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."

Please

Just keep in mind, there's nothing stopping web developers from using straight HTML, CSS, JPG, PNG and GIF for basic animation. If you need media, you can embed an mpeg or a simple wav file. If you need processing, you can do it as CGI/server-side, at the same time ensuring 100% browser compatibility and avoiding the hijacking the web-client's CPU. Don't blame Adobe or MS or Sun for providing closed or deeply complicated, uncontrollable technologies; blame yourself for using them.

Flash no more "subverts" the web than Photoshop "subverts" image processing, or the GPL subverts how software is published. You want to use these things, that's your choice. There are other options available that are just as useful, and in some cases, more so.

Agree, but...

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.

Re:Agree, but...

The government already fucks up everything it touches.

Yes, the colossal failure of TCP/IP is one clear example.

Re:Please

Although I agree with you, no one is forced into using these technologies, look at the way the Internet is today. Many sites employ IE specific bugs to render and end up being displayed wrong or not at all in other browsers that are fully standards-compliant. "Force"-feeding people with this proprietary and often crappy technologies tends to bind people to these technologies in the long run and slow down improvement therefore diminishing quality.

Re:Please

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

A few years ago I had a girlfriend (yes I know this is Slashdot) and she was blind. Her biggest complaint was that her reader was completely useless when presented with a site that used Flash for its navigation system. Looking around now I'm sure that matters have become even worse.

Flash accessibility has improved significantly in the past few years. However that doesn't mean that Flash designers always avail themselves of this technology. I suspect the type of designer who would happily use Flash for navigation is the type of designer who is unaware blind people use computers at all.

Re:Please

Just keep in mind, there's nothing stopping web developers from using straight HTML, CSS, JPG, PNG and GIF for basic animation.

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:Please

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:Please

MS do stop web developers from using straight CSS. There are so many basic layout features that are not implemented or buggy that I understand why some developers go down the propitiatory route for the sake of a consistent look. And it wasn't that long ago when IE still couldn't display a PNG with an alpha channel.

70-75% of web users can't be wrong.

Please Yourself

Just keep in mind, there's nothing stopping web developers from using straight HTML, CSS, JPG, PNG and GIF for basic animation.

And what if they want something fancier than "basic animation"?

Flash no more "subverts" the web than Photoshop "subverts" image processing,

Apples and oranges. Images created in Photoshop don't need any special software to view. Content created in Flash does.

... or the GPL subverts how software is published.

On the contrary, GPL is meant to subvert proprietary software publishing. The difference is that the subversion is deliberate, and meant to open things up, as opposed to the closing off that Flash, which shuts things off, but only as a kind of side effect.

This is rather an old story. Back in 1995, back when Netscape was the biggest operator in a competitive browser market, they took a lot of flack for introducing non-standard features into HTML. And they didn't do it to "close off the market", they did it because they wanted to create web applications that weren't supported by existing standards, and weren't going to wait for W3C to bring the standards up to date.

Then we went through the whole thing all over with Microsoft and Internet Explorer. And because MS really was trying to control the marketplace, everybody ignored the role W3C was playing. And still plays.

wav is not so simple; neither is sync

there's nothing stopping web developers from using straight HTML, CSS, JPG, PNG and GIF for basic animation.

What should I use for vector animation? Windows Internet Explorer still doesn't work well with SVG+JS.

If you need media, you can embed an mpeg or a simple wav file.

Like AVI, WAVE is a container that can wrap any of several audio codecs, including MP3. Which codecs more sophisticated than straight PCM are supported in most web browsers? And how can I indicate to the majority of web browsers how a particular MPEG-1 file or WAVE file should be synchronized to JavaScript-mediated animation? I don't know of any web browsers that are compatible with SMIL.

The W3C? Glacial?

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.

Mod parent up...

It's a self-fulfilling prophecy by the worst abuser.

Re:The W3C? Glacial?

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.

Re:The W3C? Glacial?

True, SVG should be a standard available on all browsers, but only FF supports it.

Opera, Safari and Konqueror support SVG too. Internet Explorer is the only major browser that doesn't.

Re:The W3C? Glacial?

CSS2 is still in the works. The final version has still not been published.

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?

CSS4 is still in the works. The final version has still not been published.

CSS5 is still in the works. The final version has still not been published.

CSS6 is still in the works. The final version has still not been published.

CSS7 is still in the works. The final version has still not been published.

CSS8 is still in the works. The final version has still not been published.

CSS9 is still in the works. The final version has still not been published.

CSS10 is still in the works. The final version has still not been published.

CSS11 is still in the works. The final version has still not been published.

This is a large paragraph full of useless text to get around Slashdot's annoying "characters per line" filter. It is generously padded with long lines of text to increase the average line length significantly over it's originally puny value of 19.0. Ideally, this paragraph will let me post the above comment. I certainly don't recommend reading all this, since it is intended entirely as filler content, like the other nine songs on a pop CD. This is fluff, like the fluff that drifts from the cottonwood trees, or spewed from major news organizations like so many soggy white drifts from an industrial snowblower. Really, I'm losing my mind writing this. Ok, lets try now! Nope, still not good enough. Right now I'm at 25.7. I'm really not sure where the cutoff is, so I'll just keep going. I gotta tell you, I honestly don't think the film rights to this whole saga are gonna be worth much: didn't Dumb and Dumberer tank? Seriously, SCO should move to California where things are already so far off their rocker that even McBride would fit in. One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish...A chicken farmer went out, one dark and windy day. He rested by the coop, as he went along his way. When all at once a rotten egg, hit him in the eye. It was the site he dreaded...ghost chickens in the sky. Ok, maybe that's enough drivel. I'll try posting again.

The W3C has been burned, too...

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?

W3C glacial process?

I find it funny that someone (especially from Mozilla) blames the W3C for glacial process, when even Firefox 3 still doesn't have something as basic as box-shadow (with the "-moz" vendor prefix of course, since the spec is still a draft).

And Opera, which used to be the "latest" in W3C support (even draft), still doesn't support border-radius nor box-shadow in their latest version.

Like it or not, Safari is pushing W3C standards faster than Opera and Firefox combined.

As for Microsoft, they're still trying to kill the web in two ways: with extremely slow/buggy compliance with W3C standards and with proprietary crap like Silverlight.

Adobe has Flash and Air, which isn't really better except for the fact that at least they're trying to push their crap on many platforms, not only Windows.

Even Flash could be replaced on websites like YouTube if the browsers finally supported HTML 5's media tags.

anyone remember vrml?

virtual reality markup language. didn't think so

a standards body should be slow, not out front, writing standards for things no one knows will be successful or not

in fact, the commercial players SHOULD get proprietary, aggresive technologies out there, seeking new markets. let them play and crash and burn

then, after something proves successful, the standards body plods along and picks it up and makes it canon

the idea that the standards body should get out front, leads to standards being written for things no one uses. the idea that commercial companies won't try to capitalize on owning the technology presumes that corporations are interested in not making money. let a company write nonstandard tech. its a gamble for them, and could hurt them. let them get hurt then, and make space for things like firefox

so the whole basis for the story here is preposterous: ok, we have different browsers and competing platforms and different standards and proprietary tech. big. fucking. deal. get your head out of your anal retentive ass and deal with it

oh it takes 10 hours to program a page that should take 10 minutes to program were everyone fascistically devoted to standards? well then you wouldn't have a job genius. you wouldn't be needed. the mess you have to deal with is proof you are needed. if it weren't messy, you'd be downsized and replaced by a perl script

people who whine and bitch and moan about standards and noncompliance are motivated by the same shrill cloying need as grammar nazis. and if you understand why grammar nazis are essentially useless, annoying, and just don't get it, you understand whats up those who are so shrill about standards

the world is a messy place. get used to it

Own it..?

Who really owns something that you make in Flash? Just as when you write a document in Word, when you compose in a proprietary format, you hand the keys over to the vendor. You, and anybody who wants to view or edit what you've created, have to go through the One Software Company. And that's permanent; whatever DRM or platform decisions the company makes in the future will bind you as well.

Re:Own it..?

I know, I are have a smarts, I are

Re:oh please

If we did things their way we'd have perfectly rendering web pages all the time, but the content they hosted would be so dull most consumers wouldn't be interested.

That's evident by the fact that not one of the major websites out there that I can think of (facebook, google, microsoft, and even the bbc to name a few) are fully W3C compliant.

Well, there are a couple things about "compliance" to consider. First, because browsers don't always implement the standards fully or properly, you might have to use hacks to get everything to display properly in all browsers. Current web designers have to know browsers' bugs as much as the standards, so many web pages can't comply with the standards and render properly at the same time. That doesn't mean the standards are at fault. The inability to follow standards on the web is largely traceable to a single company which refuses to make a compliant browser.

But also, the real issue of standards is not to force everything into compliance at all times. It's to give a standard way of doing things so that people can expect certain things to be consistent. The point of web standards is so that I, as a developer, can write a web page in accordance with a set of rules, and then have a reasonable expectation that the page will display properly. It makes it so I shouldn't really have to worry about what browser the end-user has installed, because they should all display the page (roughly) the same way. If you wish to violate the standards for some purpose, that's fine, but then you should familiarize yourself with how that violation will effect various platforms. But, in fact, there are even standards about how formats should handle violations of the standard, and so even the violation may be... well... according to the standard.

But none of this explains to me why the standards would make the *content* of web pages "dull". If the content is interesting, the web wouldn't generally be dull. Relying on presentation to make your content exciting doesn't speak well for your content, and on the Internet, content is king.

If anything, it seems like the Internet wouldn't exist as it does today if the HTML standard hadn't been so simple and open. It allowed anyone with half a brain to make webpages and display their content. The ease with which individuals can create content is essential for the P2P "community" nature of the web. If not for that, it would be like TV-- pushed from big companies who have the resources and expertise to make it work. Even expecting someone to buy expensive software (e.g. Adobe Flash) in order to develop content would hurt the web immensely. The barrier of entry is much lower when the only necessary equipment for making content is a text editor.

Re:W3C is own worst enemy

There are also problems with the lack of any kind of dynamic font loading to use custom fonts in a web page.

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:video

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.