Comments for Power vs. Authority
In any case, tips on how to make it move faster? I'd like for that to happen if possible. :-)
I think you hit the nail on the head when you say "there’s no mechanism in place by which any browser vendor can take significant risks without incurring the wrath of a swarm of WaSPs". Conceptually, why couldn't Silverlight become a standard or at least considered? (not that I'm arguing for or against that happening) There are two different implementations of it Silverlight which is one of the W3Cs requirements.
There's a symbiosis between innovation and standards. You're pushing innovation, and saying that standards will come along, someday, maybe. If all we do is innovate, all we have is chaos.
To be honest, I don't see what either you or Paul want differently, other than you want the W3C to "do more". What innovation should we be pursuing?
Ah never mind. I'm an outsider, what do I know.
Consider the recent CSS features added by WebKit: transformations, animations, gradients, masks, et cetera. They’ve very nearly _run out_ of standards to implement, so they’re starting to implement the wouldn’t-it-be-cool-if stuff. If I’m not mistaken, this is the exact sort of thing you’re wishing for.
One of the things I find interesting--and even amusing--is that (IMHO) Webkit is doing these things not because "they've nearly run out of cool things to implement"; I think they are doing this as part of the Mobile Me push, and as part of the iPhone browser/app push. The irony (and probably it's a good thing, not a bad one) is that this is exactly the reason why XMLHTTP evolved--IIRC, it was created at the request of the Outlook Web team (i.e. Microsoft) to help them make Outlook Web a more seamless experience.
Where would we be today if they hadn't done that?
I'm not pessimistic about the W3C, I'm indifferent to it. I'm not a member, I pay no dues, and while it ratified some good specs back in The Day, it just hasn't done much to keep its legitimacy or build its brand this century. Were I at the helm of such an organization, I'd be deeply worried that it has fallen prey to a the problem that Hamming reported of Shannon:
When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems.
I've loved a lot of "dead" technologies: capabilities for security applications, functional programming languages, non-relational databases, javascript – , lord knows I've worked on my share of things that took much longer than planned...so I'm completely willing to accept the premise that I'll be terribly wrong some day about the importance of the things that I linked to, and in specific the "Semantic Web".
It's no stretch, however, to suggest that what the web has needed most, and for a long time, is for our existing markup language (HTML) to evolve some much less academically interesting semantics to better handle the applications being demanded of it. That work is now (slowly) under way via HTML 5, but it seems to have taken some doing to talk the W3C's membership and participants down from the Semantic Web and XML ledge. That HTML 5 even clings to an XML serialization at all as a goal is pretty laughable given the glaring design flaws and adoption failure of XML as a format. What I worry most about is that it's indicative of how jaundiced the "main line" W3C participant perspective has become with regards to the real-world application of W3C specs.
Real-world application is what buys the organization legitimacy, and my point wasn't that those specs were "failures" in solving their specific problems, it was that the W3C can't drive their adoption much beyond the already appreciated need in the market for any given standard. The Semantic Web might yet succeed (I'm a pessimist), but the W3C surely failed to drive its adoption by its own might. No one should have expected differently then or now, as Ian points out. Least of all the W3C membership and staff.
Jon Ferraiolo said to me once:
A good spec is one that everyone implements.
The W3C's failure here isn't that it took on Semantic Web, it's that it did so when there was no clear, broad, deep constituency for it, no existing set of vendors jockeying to have their specs ratified, and no discernible relationship to how the real, actual web is evolving. It's a great-big organizational fail.
Regards
"I find that stance odd: it’s ok for the minority market share browser to innovate, but not the browser that we REALLY NEED improvement in? I mean, sure, they need to get their CSS 2.1 story in order, but if they added all of Safari’s CSS extensions or implemented hbox and vbox, would that not cover a multitude of sins?"
They are free to innovate as they wish. But until they're caught up with the other three browsers, I'll wonder aloud why implementing, say, hbox/vbox was more important to them than implementing DOM L2 Events, the remainder of CSS 2.1, or anything else that we would be able to use TODAY were it not for IE.
Your rubric is clearly different from mine. But don't misunderstand: I find it most critical for IE to implement stuff that will make my life easier tomorrow, regardless of whether it's a standard or not. For instance: I think IE should support the CANVAS element, even though HTML5 is not yet final. I'd want them to support it even in the absence of any standard simply because they're the only browser left that hasn't.
You may be right that WaSP needs to restate their focus. They mean "standards-compliant" as an alternative to the browser wars (proprietary features and APIs designed to stay proprietary), rather than as an alternative to innovation within a web standards framework (features that act as proposals for new standards). That's my interpretation, at least.
Look, for instance, at SPARQL. This was not some kind of waterfall model - they waited until there was some kind of agreement, took two years and just nailed the spec down, providing comprehensive test cases, involving the community. Obviously, the process used for SPARQL will not fit all W3C activities - HTML and CSS, and other standards directly relevant to widely-implemented browser technology will take longer and necessitate a lot more pain.
I think that the W3C is learning very quickly that they need to change and that the nature of the Web as a decentralised system is going to change what it means to be a standards body. Two of the four browser rendering engines are open source, after all. Overall, there are a great many reasons to be optimistic about the W3C.
Thanks very much for the follow-up. An organization is a strange thing but not a stone. The W3C Process evolved, and will continue to evolve and the way it is organized will also evolve given the new requirements and the strong push of the community for the open Web standards.
It has happened in the past already. W3C had the same RAND system than IETF. The community pushed very hard saying that the W3C should give more guarantee that it will be opened and then the RF Patent Policy has been created. It created a lot of discussions and frictions but in the end, it is something which was beneficial.
And I agree with you there will be interesting challenges to come but pushing us to evolve too.
Thanks again.
Thanks for replying.
I'm aware of the W3C's activities around HTML5, DOM, WebAPIs, etc and appreciate that it is very hard work. Having served (poorly) as an invited expert to the ECMAScript working group and having participated in OpenAjax I know that it takes folks more patient than myself to build good standards. I didn't mean to suggest by my post that the W3C isn't doing the right things of late, only that the impetus for taking on specs that actually matter to the web at large comes from outside; or in your parlance, from whatever motivates the Membership.
The W3C's stated goal is:
To lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web.
But I argue that where the W3C has failed at that, it's probably not the organization's fault per sae. Indeed, the whole post was simply and extended way of saying that blaming the W3C for a lack of progress in achieving that goal is misdirected opprobrium.
It would have been nice for the W3C to have exercised considerably better judgement about what activities to undertake since the turn of the century, but no one really had any right to expect better. The W3C is a pay-to-play membership organization and members shape what activities are pursued. In order to provide the level playing field (patent policies, etc.) that you outline it would be difficult to be organized any other way.
Please don't think that I'm somehow angry or disappointed in the W3C. Much to the contrary; I just have expectations of the organization which I think more closely match its structure as a member-directed body. Many web developers, I fear, don't understand this and therefore expect too much of the W3C, venerate it unnecessarily, and then blame it for outcomes which it cannot control.
Regards
"Blaming the W3C for not pushing the web forward is both humorously off-target and distressingly common."
So who is suppose to push the web forward? The W3C were set up to create web standards. If they have failed, then they are part of the phenomenon of the propriety web we live with today.
Really the W3C are composed of puppets on a string. The people who pull these strings are the people with power and with this power they make plenty of money.
News like this week where IE8 beta has decided to align with other browsers for Access Control specifications is cool, really cool. http://www.w3.org/QA/2008/07/x-site-requests
On the topic of other technologies, be semantic web, mmi, css, etc. It really depends on their own market. Semantic Web is really successful in some communities. CSS has lately taken a new pace.
I don't know if you followed the work on html 5, where all browser vendors are in the group and actively discussing and implementing. There is a lot of work to do. It is a functional specifications including the DOM, the markup, apis, parsing algorithm. It is not written for Content authors, but developers.
Often things go wrong when the main companies of the market are not here.
You cite also Javascript. It is done by ECMA which is another standard organization. A new version of Javascript is being ironed there.
I find that stance odd: it's ok for the minority market share browser to innovate, but not the browser that we REALLY NEED improvement in? I mean, sure, they need to get their CSS 2.1 story in order, but if they added all of Safari's CSS extensions or implemented hbox and vbox, would that not cover a multitude of sins? Those who would answer "no", IMO, are part of the problem and are the reason why organizations like WaSP have zero strategic viewpoint. It's not that WaSP is "my way or the highway", it's that it actually can't see what's good for the web beyond whether or not something is standardized. It's just not in the charter:
http://www.webstandards.org/about/mission/
WaSP clearly lays out the problems that every webdev faces and then proceeds to suggest how it will continue to be brining knives to gunfights for the foreseeable future:
Thus one of WaSP’s primary goals is to provide educational resources that can help our peers learn standards-compliant methods that are in their interest and that of their clients and site users.
Our problem isn't that people are building non-standard markup, it's that the markup and styling tools we've got are completely inadequate. Having won the last decade's war, WaSP seems totally content to sit around the VFW hall and tell the youngins about how semantic markup will solve all their problems if only they'd listen.
sigh
Regards
good analogy! I think the 10-cent answer about why browsers are different is that the developers of the content don't control them in any meaningful way. The rest of the software world has some amount of control regarding deployment environment. Changing the renderer (which is what we're taking about when we talk about upgrading "the web") goes hand-in-hand today with upgrading the rest of the browser as well, which requires the user to care...and users (to a one) don't give a flying leap about CSS 2.1 support. They care about tabs and history features and extensions and security and compatibility.
In short, browsers are different because the reasons that they evolve in terms of rendering content are completely divorced from the reasons that anyone will pick a particular browser as their day-to-day client (assuming that said browser renders most of the web).
Regards
This all goes back to the long-held opinion you aired at the WaSP panel at SXSW this year. I simply don't agree that WaSP projects a my-way-or-the-highway way of doing things.
Consider the recent CSS features added by WebKit: transformations, animations, gradients, masks, et cetera. They've very nearly run out of standards to implement, so they're starting to implement the wouldn't-it-be-cool-if stuff. If I'm not mistaken, this is the exact sort of thing you're wishing for.
I do concede that similar efforts on IE's part would be met with far more hostility. But I think it's far more important for them to implement DOM L2 Events than, say, CSS animations. They're free to innovate, but I'm free to criticize them for misplaced priorities. They can have their cake as soon as they eat their broccoli.
Why, then, having rejected this model for our own development, do we demand browsers follow it? Yes, I insist my sites adhere to standards, and want the browser makers to implement existing standards correctly. However, browser makers should not be forced to wait for an up-front consensus before innovating. That way, we woulds be stuck in 1999, without even XHR. If browsers can make a better way for me, I want them to try. I can decide what to adopt, or not adopt.
The "proprietary rathole" is a real danger at the other end of the spectrum, particularly for single-OS browsers. Standards bodies, rather than holding back browser makers, should find some way to encourage those makers to document the features/interfaces of their added features, so that other makers can implement them. Should multiple vendors adopt them, and they prove popular with users, they could even be folded into the "standard." Bottom up, driven by need -- that is how technology is driven, and standards created, in virtually every arena; why are web browsers any different?
As you said many times before, the W3C WGs should be more open to authors. A transparent web is the only way the web can move forward towards interoperability.
No doubt that HTML 5 is moving fast as a spec, particularly in comparison to the dearth of new stuff over the last 8 years or so. The reality for web authors, though, is that even when the spec work wraps up, it's still gonna be half a decade until we can use HTML 5. The bits that are pervasive (some variant of local storage, etc.) are already getting wrapped up by JavaScript libraries, which gives us new stuff on an accelerated timeframe, but that approach doesn't really have the power to tackle things like tags.
That's the biggest component of the "slowness" I was referencing.
Regards