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.
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: (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 l
Re: (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)
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: (Score:2)
You madea good post. Don't get trolled brother.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, that was a poke in the eye for sure. As the others have commented, you aren't universally hated here. That's the first reference to their being a group of people not liking you.
You're good people, don't let the AC's getcha down.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
>If software companies are putting out releases faster than the committee is putting out standards, then the committee is worthless.
No. This is completely and utterly backwards thinking. The STANDARD is there for a reason, for releases to have a target to hit for making their core technology usable. Further releases should enhance the technology *surrounding* that standard, not try to "improve" upon that standard until they and others can agree on a new version of that standard to go forward.
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?
How has backwards thinking like this become so prevalent in modern technology? I don't get it.
Wrong. The standard is there to allow competition so that one company doesn't control the technology. HTML has always been made up by the browsers and has always been open so that web developers can use it. There's nothing wrong with that.
I just need to know what to put in my web page header to tell a browser how to parse the output. If I want to use bleeding features supported by a subset of browsers, that's my problem. But if I want to reach the widest possible audience, I need to know what features
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.
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: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.
Re: (Score:3)
I have been on the sending end of that problem. KOffice and OpenOffice generate ODT files that differ wildly in their interpretation of parts of the standard that aren't specified. For spreadsheet files in particular, there are more things that are unspecified than are specified. Trying to collaborate using KOffice and OpenOffice is worse than using different versions of Excel.
Re: (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, Informative)
It's nothing like Word get a grip.
Apple created canvas, submitted to W3C, Mozilla submitted changes, canvas was standardized, then Apple invested significant engineerig resources into changing their canvas implementation to match the standard.
If you want an academic standard with no real world use, XHTML 2 is available for your masturbatory needs. The Web needs a practical HTML standard that documents how you DO write HTML, not how you theoretically SHOULD write HTML.
Canvas patent (Score:3)
Apple created canvas, submitted to W3C
And a lot of people complain about Apple's patent on the <canvas> element. Apple isn't required to license this patent until <canvas> becomes part of a W3C Recommendation.
Re: (Score:3)
A standard that says how things are done is not a standard. It is merely documentation.
A standard sets a standard, an expectation of behavior. If you do not meet that expectation, you are not compliant with the standard. Period.
You can not have a standard that contradicts itself because then, nothing could ever actually implement it. This is one problem with the HTML5 standard, it is unimplementable due to self contradiction. This problem is made worse because now even theoretically compliant browsers will
Helping you with definition of evil (Score:2)
Gee, that sounds like - a De Facto standard. Like MS Word .doc format! Guess evil is in the eye of the beholder.
Good is when you help other companies ship a product that supports a generally agreed upon standard - like HTML5 extensions. That way you compete in the market based on quality of product.
Evil is when you ship something you promote as a standard that you will not help anyone else ship a competing product for, like .doc.
Re: (Score:3)
evil? no. Beauty? Death? Petrification? Anti-magic? sure. Evil is in the alignment of a Beholder.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I am curious if the attempt to strive toward HTML# compliance didn't result in more uniformity among them, however. I am trying not to fall into the trap of assuming that everything will become proprietary, but without an independent body saying "here's the standard, and here's where you are", then won't the compatibility problems get worse?
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly. I'm not even sure if I'd agree with author's goal in an idea world.
What does he want, some independent body of academics, bureaucrats, public input, commercial bodies... setting up the HTML spec without any idea of how it will be implemented, used...
Oh no... as far as I'm concerned, you want to determine the fate of HTML, you build a browser (or some connected product) and join the committee. Fight it out.
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, 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: (Score:2)
What, in this context, is the difference between a company and a foundation?
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Foundation is not for profit, company is for profit. As you may have noticed from recent history, if a company for profit makes a 'standard' it will only be possible to get implemented either by said company or with the blessings (patent licenses) of said company (DOC, ActiveX, MSOffice Open XML, Silverlight, Flash, DECNet, Skype...). When a foundation makes a standard it will be possible to get different implementations without any restrictions (OpenDocument, HTML, WebM/VP8, Ethernet, ...)
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: (Score:2)
Standards committees that didn't have to ship anything were responsible for a ton of late 80s to mid 90s disasters, like X.500, X.509 (certificates), and the whole of the ISO networking stack. There are borderline disasters such as SNMP. There are smoking radioactive holes where you don't want /ever/ want to go (SOAP is my favorite example here).
The proper path: Write working code, get users and customers, re-design and re-write a few times, THEN you can have a standard.
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: (Score:3)
It never had complete control, but it did its job. It established a level playing field and and brought parity (more or less) to four different browser engines. Now that there *is* competition, all four vendors are busy as bees trying to add new features and mimic the new features added by the other vendors. So we don't need a standard per se, as long as we have users that have iPhones expecting that a web page will work the same way on their desktops.
So kudos to the W3C for making it viable for other br
Re: (Score:3)
Not really. A "rolling" standard allows the periodic adoption and standardization of a single tag or attribute, which would allow progress on that front while the vendors continue to bicker about the other proposed changes. It's like of like the JCP process was (sans incorporation into a major version release). Different ideas are proposed: some get formalized and adopted and some languish. Nothing wrong with that. The result is that you get a browser or update with support for (for example) WSR-1234 w
HTML *was* simple (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (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:HTML *was* simple (Score:5, Informative)
Remember when it was ok to use a "b" tag, and no one scoffed? How about table layouts? It's funny, the new standards aren't always better.
If you still think it's actually not better, sorry, but you should have 10 blind persons hit you with their canes...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (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 t
Re: (Score:2)
Heh, sorry, tables were never okay to use tables for layout.
Re: (Score:2)
I'll reply to you, including your sig.
I haven't yet seen the principle that for a true groundswell of a phenomenon, you need a huge swath of "low end users" Just Doing Stuff. Then the experts could float on top pushing the edge.
I saw layout as a necessary evil to get a structure for information. I'm no Developer, so I only need to be a 1-trick guy if it "the consensus" says it works. Count me in the class of people who want to Just Do Stuff.
Taking the long view, we're just about to see the Decline and Fall
Re: (Score:2)
Remember when it was ok to use a "b" tag, and no one scoffed? How about table layouts? [...] I could teach my grandparents how to edit HTML 10 years ago. Now, not so much
Huh? The "b" tags still works. Here you go: bold. Tables still work too. If you want to use them, use them.
If you want more adoption, focus HTML on what actually is important - layout that's understandable to the masses.
Most people use GUI apps to create web pages. They couldn't care less whether the code produced by their GUI is done according to one standard or another. And suppose they did care. Are you claiming that a wave of popular support would then cause WHATWG to be successful, MS to support web standards, and patent holders to release their codecs under royalty-free terms?
HTML should be more focused on making layouts easier, and faster. It should not be focused on animation.
Well, first off, html 5 isn't j
That's not what the masses want. Or need. (Score:2)
The problem is that we're turning the browser into an application-level container. HTML should be more focused on making layouts easier, and faster
But that's not what "the masses" want, or even need.
The masses like doing things over the web, so any standards that improve the ability to do more things in the browser help people. The demand is obviously there from the growth of Flash.
The "masses" also NEVER wanted to edit HTML. Not directly. Because most people HATE AND FEAR code. You simply cannot make
Re:HTML *was* simple (Score:4, Funny)
Remember when it was OK to use an "i" tag, and it worked on Slashdot?
Re: (Score:2)
Remember when it was ok to use a "b" tag, and no one scoffed? How about table layouts? It's funny, the new standards aren't always better. This is why a format "of the people" isn't going anywhere. I could teach my grandparents how to edit HTML 10 years ago. Now, not so much. Is that better? I'd argue, no.
yeah, and 25 years ago i could teach my mother how to manually mark blocks and insert formating codes on text edited in an 8-bit computer. technology evolves, things get more complicated, then new tools apear to ease the process. so what if you can't create a good looking site using vi or notepad anymore ? use a goddamn authoring tool.
HTML should be more focused on making layouts easier, and faster. It should not be focused on animation. This is where MS Word has fallen off a cliff. If you want more adoption, focus HTML on what actually is important - layout that's understandable to the masses.
oh, and let animation be the focus of adobe flash ? video to real networks, microsoft or apple ? remember the same 10 years ago, we needed 3 different plugins installed so we
Re: (Score:2)
You still can. Not that much has changed. In fact, HTML+CSS now is easier IMHO than 10 years ago and I've been doing this since '95. The real issue you're getting to is that people want much more out of their websites than they did 10 years ago and that requires more skillsets. A Geocities page just doesn't cut it anymore since now people are more familiar with what's possible and have raised their e
Re: (Score:2)
Sure it was... before those tags were added.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
CSS is horrible for table layouts (Score:2)
CSS has no sane table layout syntax. The only way to do tables in CSS is to basically DUPLICATE the HTML table syntax using div tags with table properties on them - tell me how that is better in any way shape or form?
There is a difference between content markup, content layout, and content styling. The problem is people get them all confused and try to shoe-horn improper tools in each.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
floats are not meant for doing layouts.
using floats for even fairly simple layouts almost always results in horrible hacks.
Floats should be used for 2 cases:
- you want to illustrate some text with an image (or a box, block, table...), and you want the text to fill the space on the side of it, then resume to full available width under it.
- you have several boxes (or images or whatever) that you want to place side by side, filling the available horizontal space, then continue on a new line whe
Re: (Score:2)
In the sense that it can be made to work in all the major browsers, yes.
The GP is right - tables are for tables of data, not for laying out content that is not actually tabular. You wouldn't write a document in a spreadsheet just because that would mean not having to worry about tabstops, would you?
Re: (Score:2)
If you want to display data in a table, use table tags. That's fine. That's what they're there for. They're NOT there for general block-level content layout.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not sure what you mean by "table layouts"
The table tag is a tool, and its job is to display tabular data. Using it for anything else (design and layout of a page) is where the shoe-horning happens.
Re: (Score:2)
What in the world are you smoking? Granny's web site does not need to be ADA compliant, and she's not likely to "refactor" the layout. Tabled layouts are fine for Granny. Hell, some of the "solutions" to common css problems involve once again mixing layout and content. At that point, who cares if Granny encloses something in a DIV or a TABLE?
"not a truly independent standards process" (Score:2)
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: (Score:2)
W3C should retire (Score:2)
I can't remember if W3C has ever really successfully moved the HTML language ahead. Much of the early improvements were due to Netscape and Microsoft throwing new features around willy-nilly. A bunch of those features would be chosen to be part of the standard, while the rest (layers, blink, marquee) would fade away into disuse. As soon as the major players focused more on following the standards rather than setting them, then everything seemed to just grind to a halt. It wasn't until browser makers started
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, the W3C was crucial to preventing MSFT from just turning IE into a Frontpage renderer.
It was a pity that it didn't stop Netscape from becoming the pile of steaming crud that it ended up being (prior to Mozilla). What Microsoft did was no different to what Netscape did. If Netscape had won the war, then we would be complaining how much Netscape Navigator and Netscape One were tied together.
All Microsoft needed was a competitor to force it to maintain some sort of compatibilty. With Netscape out of action for so long, that role went to W3C. But it was during this period that development of the
Re: (Score:2)
We lost 10 years of W3C work thanks to WHATWG and their html5 junk
Well, that was the problem. If it hadn't taken 10 years to go from version 1 to version 2 then perhaps another group would not have had time to come in and steal their thunder.
Eh? (Score:5, Informative)
HTML has effectively been abandoned to four companies: Apple, Google, Opera, and Mozilla.
And Microsoft is where?
Their Internet Explorer is used by most Internet users today ( http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0 [hitslink.com] )
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Microsoft is, I think, implementing the standard (slowly) rather than defining it. And I'd argue that the same is true of Mozilla and Opera to some extent.
It seems to me that it's Webkit that's pushing the standard, with Apple and Google as the major contributors but with a whole load of other companies along for the ride. The Webkit project is becoming a de-facto standards body with a members list that includes every smartphone platform builder except Microsoft.
Re:Eh? (Score:5, Informative)
They are still there. The article just fails to mention them. Microsoft has contributed a LOT to the HTML 5 specification process. A very large number of test cases were submitted by them, and they contribute during the discussions as well. It's just the author obviously has a very anti-microsoft bias. And for the purposes of the article, the lack of any one company doesn't really matter the principle remains the same.
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.
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.
Open Screen Project (Score:2)
[HTML] *is* an open standard, implementable by anyone who reads the spec.
Apple holds patents that cover <canvas>. See my other comment [slashdot.org].
Flash is not.
What you said was true until February 2009, when Adobe changed the license terms [wikipedia.org] for the SWF specification.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Could be worse (Score:5, Insightful)
What's with all the hate? (Score:4, Informative)
Last I checked, anyone could submit ideas, corrections, feature requests *RIGHT THERE ON THE HTML5 WORKING DRAFT*. "Feedback Comments" right at the top of http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/ [w3.org]
Now, if they ignore your idea, that's almost certainly because it sucks and is badly written. No really, it does suck. Follow the instructions there *carefully*, really think about this feature or tag or whatever you're requesting, and your ideas will get consideration.
I must be getting old (Score:2)
Standards are based on who shows up (Score:2)
Standards always tend to be dominated by the people and companies that show up.
Welcome to corporate feudalism (Score:3)
What's happening with this issue is a microcosm of what's happening in the world. Democracy and the rule of law wither, while wealth, in the form of organizations or a few super-rich individuals control outcomes.
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: (Score:2)
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?
It makes sense to include them in the standardization process. It doesn't make sense to let the standardization* process be dictated by them, with no one else having a say on it, whether they are competing companies (MS included) or, ghasp, any of the thousands of people that make a living developing and maintaining the WWW.
* this isn't a standardization process per se. Once the WHATWG decided to abandon versioning numbers they effectively abandoned any attempt to define a basic set of features which any i
Re: (Score:2)
but MS never bothered to support xhtml in IE
In what sense? The site I'm working on is XHTML 1.0 strict compliant and renders properly in IE 6, 7 and 8. No, we don't use MathML, but to say simply "IE doesn't support XHTML" seems somewhat disingenuous.
Re: (Score:2)
In what sense? The site I'm working on is XHTML 1.0 strict compliant and renders properly in IE 6, 7 and 8. No, we don't use MathML, but to say simply "IE doesn't support XHTML" seems somewhat disingenuous.
You're mistaken. Xhtml only works in IE if you serve it as text/html. If you have xhtml+mathml content, you're supposed to deliver it as application/xhtml+xml, but then IE won't display it. This makes it impossible to make a single, static xhtml web page that uses xhtml features (such as mathml) and renders in both IE and other browsers.
3 more... (Score:2)
That's 3 more than we used to have. And not to put to fine a point on it, but
Re: (Score:2)
I liked where you were going with that thought, a shame you had to leave.
Re: (Score:2)
I kept typing after I hit the preview button. The preview looked fine, but then it posted that typing (not the preview) when I clicked submit.
I feel like there's something in that about Ajax and web standards...
Re: (Score:2)
Huh, when I hit preview there's no means to continue typing...
Re: (Score:2)
Yes. It was in between the time when I hit preview and when my page actually showed the preview div. Due to some bizarre networking setups in my house I have a decent amount of lag.
Reference implementation (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Defining "standard" and "open source" (Score:2)
Most standards that actually work have open-source reference implementations.
Then I guess video codecs are exceptions to your "most standards". ISO publishes standards, many of which are standards for mathematical systems. These have a reference implementation in a computer program whose source code is available to the public. However, due to ISO's patent policy, many standards cannot be implemented in open source software as Open Source Initiative defines it [opensource.org]. For example, ISO allows MPEG-LA to attach a uniform royalty to the MPEG-4 standard, including the controversial AVC Advanced
just being realistic (Score:3)
The lack of version numbers is just being realistic. No browser is 100% compliant even with HTML 4.01, which has been around for how long now? And when is HTML 4.02 coming out? Seems to me they've abandoned the versions a long time ago. Everyone just uses HTML 4.01.
They can make a HTML 5.00 standard, and have most of the browsers implement 99% of it and then they release 5.01 and the browser makers will get to work implementing that, but totally abandon implementing that last 1% of the HTML 5.00 spec... because they would be too busy implementing 5.01, 5.02, etc. So a Web developer sets a HTML 5.00 doctype, uses a feature that isn't implemented yet hoping that someday browsers may support it. But there is no guarantee they will. So the web developer will just change the doctype to 5.01, 5.02 (or whatever the latest version of the spec is) every time he makes changes to a web page or CMS.
So they're just being realistic. No matter what standard they come up with, it will never be implemented fully by all browsers. Their standard won't be the law, it will be more of a guideline. Having version numbers is pretty pointless when all browsers aren't going to render a HTML 5.01 document exactly the same. Its easier for the web developer to tell the browser that this is a HTML 5 doc and the browser will use its latest code to render the page.
Re: (Score:3)
ok so you target HTML 5.00 which isn't implemented perfectly. You test it and notice a few problems on a couple of browsers. You do a work around for those browsers.
Then a couple of years from now a developer for one of the glitchy browsers notices a bug in how it renders HTML 5.00. What should he do? if he fixes the bug then your workaround is going make the page be rendered in a way that you didn't intend. A couple of more years later, that browser gets a completely new rewrite of its rendering engine. No
This is the W3C's fault (Score:2)
As a standards making body, the W3C was pretty much doomed as soon as they abandoned things that people actually use and decided to focus on XHTML 2 for so long (which almost nobody was interested in).
The result was WHAT-WG being created (with the major browser players) to do the work that needed to be done: adding features to HTML that people actually care about.
Of course we've got the major vendors making the standard, they're the only ones who have been actually focused on making a standard for years! If
standardizing HTML is flawed in its very concept (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, no great loss.
I proposed something to the W3C many years ago that would have improved web security (and if implemented would have stopped the myspace and other XSS worms). But the W3C are just interested in more and more "Go" buttons and they didn't even want a single "Stop" button.
Anyway, Mozilla has finally proposed something in concept (more encompassing but also more complex) CSP which might help: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/CSP [mozilla.org].
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The proper way is to use a span with class="blink" and do the blinking in javascript.
Re:HTML compliance is for wankers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
The major browsers just don't give a crap what you feed them.
The same is not necessarily true of assisstive technologies such as screen readers.
Now if all you care about is the maximum return on investment that probably isn't important to you, but in that case I'd be wary of throwing the word wanker around too much...
Re: (Score:3)
That's funny, I've encountered lots of people using Microsoft Word as their HTML editor who say just the same thing. So you're in good company.
Validators make a good sanity check/diagnostic tool when something isn't working correctly in Foobar browser, but they're not a crutch. Once you've got a solid working knowledge of HTML they're not really going to teach you much but might find a few typos.
Once you move beyond HTML and into CSS, valid HTML can certainly make a difference, but if you're sticking with H
Re: (Score:2)
Browsers are more consistent than ever in what they support,
This may be true for the latest version of every major browser (which is different from just "browsers" because there are many actively developed browsers out there based on icky stuff like MSIE6 or Firefox 2), but it does not help the web developer when he needs to carefully add 4-5 different CSS declarations in a particular order just to add a gradient or round corners... The problem just multiplies with the new features being added to JS (Web Workers etc.)...