Future for Web Standards Pondered 357
An anonymous reader writes "With the next version of Internet Explorer tied to the release of longhorn, and still years off, what hope is there for innovation in CSS, SVG, XHTML and other web standards? Is the future of the web similarly tied to Internet Explorer and Longhorn? This article ponders this gloomy future, and sees a ray or two of hope."
Article Text (Score:4, Informative)
Plus ca change
In a recent post I reminisced about the early days of CSS, and a few of the people I recall as influential and important in the development of a standards based web.
But usually I am the kind of person who looks to the future. In the last few months Microsoft made a couple of very significant announcements with possibly quite negative implications for the future of a standards based web. Which has me thinking about that future, and wondering whether there even is such future.
Since the release of Netscape and Internet Explorer 4, there has been a steady movement toward the idea of standards based web development. In some respects the innovation both in the underlying standards and their implementation has been quite extraordinary. But as the kids in the back seat are always asking "Are we there yet"?
In a sense, there is no "there". Perhaps plateaus or way stations along the way, but no final destination. Right now it may seem like we are at one of those way stations. A reasonably large subset of CSS2 (soon to become CSS2.1) is quite well supported by most browsers.
CSS and xhtml support are markedly improved since the early parts of this decade.
But is it a way station, or are we just stalled?
Microsoft has in the last few months both discontinued IE for the Macintosh altogether, and let it be known there will be no new IE for today's generation of Windows based computers. The next iteration of IE will be solely for "longhorn" based systems (longhorn being the code name for the successor to Windows XP). Any such systems are unlikely before 2006, leaving a several year hiatus between major upgrades for IE, the single most pervasive web platform by a long way. And at present the platform with the most web standards "issues".
Which makes wonder - will we see standards based innovation in future?
Who cares about standards?
When it comes to commercial competition, standards are the friend of those without market dominance. The dominant player sets the "industry standard", as companies who dominate their niche tend to describe their software.
I believe that during the second half of the 1990s, during the most innovative time of the development CSS, commercial considerations did not play a significant part either in the development of CSS or in its implementation in browsers. CSS flew below the radar at Microsoft and Netscape/AOL/Time Warner. That won't happen again.
So what might the future hold? Let's turn the browsers for a moment. What happens here will determine what happens with CSS and standards more generally.
Where are we now?
Internet Explorer 6
When Microsoft did not dominate the browser market, open standards leveled the paying field for them. But now with IE dominant, will Microsoft be so supportive of standards?
Internet Explorer 6 is for Windows only. It supports much of CSS 2.1 though support for attribute based selectors, and more sophisticated selectors in general, such as the child selector is limited. It has some serious issues with the box model and positioning which cause many developers considerable frustration.
As noted before, IE 6 is the last version of IE which will be available until probably mid 2006, perhaps later, and the next version will never work on today's computers, not even on XP.
It's the end of the road for IE as we know it.
So, if things stay as they are, with Internet Explorer the benchmark, then say goodbye to CSS innovation for a long long time.
There are number of things which may affect this. First, CSS's design to allow forward compatibility means the user experience for more advanced browsers can be enhanced without compromising the experience of IE users. And there is even a simple way of hiding things from IE, using the child selector, which no version of IE on windows supports.
If not IE, who will innovate?
Opera? Mozilla? Anyone?
The more important question is who will innovate on the
Konqueror (Score:4, Interesting)
1) I believe Konqueror is the best browser currently out there. Some will complain that it is not available for Windows. But then, why should, or since based on Qt, why shouldn't it be possible
2) The most important thing for standards is that not patented technology will be allowed to sneak into the standards.
Re:Konqueror (Score:5, Interesting)
It mostly displays everything correctly, yes. Good stuff.
Re:Konqueror (Score:5, Insightful)
With the next version of Internet Explorer tied to the release of longhorn, and still years off, what hope is there for innovation in CSS, SVG, XHTML and other web standards?
There's all the MORE hope for standards. standards that will actually be adhered to creating a sea of non-monoculture browsers, all working to a common goal, instead of one megacorp defining in secret what a browser should do.
Real innovation will come with the proper open standards, allowing ALL people using all OSs to access the web how it was intended.
Re:Konqueror (Score:5, Insightful)
There's all the MORE hope for standards. standards that will actually be adhered to creating a sea of non-monoculture browsers, all working to a common goal, instead of one megacorp defining in secret what a browser should do.
That would be great if the vast majority of people would use them. The last time I looked [thecounter.com], about 95% of people are using IE. Even if those numbers are off, most people use IE. That means that people have to make sure that their pages work in IE.
Standards are good. Standards that people develop to are better. Standards, no matter how good, that don't impact the majority of end-users are useless.
Re:Konqueror (Score:5, Insightful)
They'd feel that it was the fault of the web site author, and not their browser. After all, it used to work, and now it doesn't work. They didn't change their browser, so the web site must have changed.
And thus it is the fault of the web site owner.
It doesn't matter that they made their web site "standards compliant". Customers don't give a rats behind about "standards compliant". The only thing they care about is "Does it work with my browser".
If it doesn't, they'll either complain to the site owner (unlikely) or they'll just stop using the site.
Re:Konqueror (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Konqueror (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Konqueror (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Konqueror (Score:2, Informative)
Additioanlly, the $2000 license is a propreitary license. You can not just simply compile konqueror on it for both
Re:Konqueror (Score:2)
A native windows based port would be good. Sourceforge has one started but no one seems to have done anything other than start it.
Safari based on conqueror- parent not OT (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Konqueror (Score:2)
That aside, unfortunately Konq. is not "the best browser currently out there" (which, by extension, means Safari isn't either). Look up the Konq CSS rendering bugs on the kde buglists. Also, try getting it to use the xsl you associated with your xhtml file. Or xml+CSS. It's getting there, though.
About running on windows, Apple managed to untie Khtml from QT, so anyone really interested
This guy said it all. (Score:3, Interesting)
Oddly enough the Mac version (safari) doesn't seem to have as many rendering problems.
Innovation vs. Standards (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Innovation vs. Standards (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Innovation vs. Standards (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Innovation vs. Standards (Score:3, Insightful)
Derek
Possible Reword? (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps I could reword your statement to:
But really, standards have stifled innovation, and they don't have to.
Re:Innovation vs. Standards (Score:5, Insightful)
That all depends which layer you're looking at. Standards tend to set things in stone, which is actually a good thing when the thing you're trying to innovate lives above the standardized layer.
For example; do you really want everybody to download the newest whizz-bang version of some operating system that doesn't comply with any standards daily? You'd have to port all your stuff all the time. Not much time left to do innovative stuff!
In fact, some standards don't preclude innovation, but they abstract it out of view. Most software is easily ported amond POSIX compliant OSes, because they, well, adhere to the POSIX standards. That doesn't mean the OS can be really innovative, with whizz-bang multimedia features, a microkernel, and a database filesystem.
TCP/IP sockets are a good example of a standard that encourages innovation; you can just open a socket and write bytes to it, or read from them. Your application can be a peer2peer voip application, and the network implementation doesn't care about that. The network can be a satellite internet connection, gigabit, or even postal pigeons, and the application doesn't care about that (well.. pigeons might be a bad choice for VOIP, but stay with me here).
Of course, it isn't all good; if you want all the nifty features of IPv6 you will have to rewrite some applications.. But IPv4 has seen us through twenty odd years. I'd say that was one of them good standards.
How would engineers like it if there were no standards for bolts and rivets? Bridge building would be a nightmare!
Incoming! (Score:4, Interesting)
So briefly stated, this is likely to be tagged as troll or flamebait, but there's a lot of truth behind this.
It is inarguable that a lot of the best innovation in the history of any industry has been made by people who go outside current standards ("Here's to the crazy ones...") and build something that is the best that they can make it first, and worry about the other considerations later.
[Note that "best" can have many contradictory meanings: best in some narrowly defined performance criteria (fastest, highest, biggest, smallest, etc.), or broad appeal (most general utility, most sell-through), or most efficient, least polluting, cheapest/easiest to manufacture, etc.]
Sometime these evolve into "de facto" standards, and it can be difficult to turn those into "open standards" where there's a level playing field for others beside the first-to-market to gain traction.
As a response, there have been many efforts to develop standards in advance of actual product. In my experience (CAD interchange languages in the 70's and 80's, XForms today), progress on these standards is relatively glacial, and they are often passed over by the industry at large.
I submit that both approaches are good, and that we ought to strive for a healthy tension between them. This argues for moderation by those who cling to the "purity" of their ideals as circumstances change out from under them, and for a willingness to exercise enlightened self-interest and surrender proprietary advantage, vs. rapacious exploitation of current dominance. (We know who we're talking about here...)
To that end, I'd rather see some of the browsers take some risks in advance of accepted standards, at the risk (and expense) of requiring a few willing innovators to perform some extra work ("click here for a non-fizbin version of this site").
Just for a couple of examples, why not re-think where some of later innovations are supported? Can the concept of tabbed browsing by pushed up to the server, so a web designer can deliver a set of related tabs to the client? Could support of the portal/portlet structure be pushed into the client, so that the work of rendering and compositing a page full of portlets can be offloaded from the server, and servlets can execute more autonomously when appropriate?
Re:Innovation vs. Standards (Score:5, Insightful)
You're baiting. Standards seek a balance to make innovation better. You just need to look at mobile phones.
In the EU, the GSM standard allowed common platform across europe, allowing seamless roaming, large array of handsets for a massive market -- and all the innovations that result.
In the US, the fractured array of mobile standards leave a higher cost for compatibility, and a lower choice: meaning users get locked in, without much incentive to change, for which vendors can play upon. Innovation has a limited scope.
The usual. (Score:5, Insightful)
Standards will be partially incorporated, but slightly fucked up. Dreamweaver 2k7 and Frontpage Longhorn will output garbled XHTML with a raped form of CSS that fails to display/work properly on any non-IE browser. SVG will turn out to be a disaster in IE, making sure everyone in 2007 is still stuck using JPGs and GIFs. By then IE will have integrated .NET ( Or some other half-assed scripting language. ) scripting abilities tied into the browser to replace the now obsolete potential ActiveX vulenrabilities. People will cry, bitch, moan, whine and Linux is set to take over the desktop market in 2007 again. Blah.
Re:The usual. (Score:3, Informative)
But there's MS Internet Explorer 6 SP2 scheduled to be released on september together with a SP for MS Windows XP.
It isn't a total new version but I belive they will incorporate some of that features.
Re:The usual. (Score:2, Informative)
Internet Explorer SP2 however will include some new features like popup-blocking and better mime-type handling but nothing along the lines of better support for PNG alpha transparency...
Re:The usual. (Score:3, Informative)
I would be more worried about hose who use word as an html editor. Frontpage tends to have a lot of proretary extensions that people like to use. A Page counter? Cool i got to have one of those.
Re:The usual. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The usual. (Score:4, Interesting)
Hope (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Hope (Score:2)
Do you want to install and run "Mozilla Firebird"? You need it to view this site.
Everyone would click Yes if it was on an important enough site, but of course it wouldn't be. It'd be quite funny, though.
Great idea! (Score:2)
It seems to me that if developers had the option of using things like proper PNG alpha support, and embedded SVG in HTML by just specifying that pages should render in a full-page Gecko ActiveX control, a lot of them probably
Re:Hope (Score:4, Informative)
Looks like (Score:5, Insightful)
It's time to tell anybody who asks you anything about their computer that they should download Mozilla or Firefox. I do, and most people who've done it have thanked me afterwards.
Re:Looks like (Score:2, Informative)
Amen. I keep a copy of Firefox in my toolkit for when I need to exorcize the demons from the computers of my friends and family. I tell them to use Firefox for "the internet" instead of IE. It takes some convincing, usually, because most folks associate the little blue "e" on their desktop with "the internet". Once they use Firefox for a while and discover the joys of a pop-up free web experience, there is usually a 12-pack of cold frosties waiting for me.
It is up to all of us techies to help spread th
Re:Looks like (Score:3, Informative)
unless of course they have already installed the 400 KB Google toolbar or any of the free, small, pop-up blockers to be found on the net. IE remains overwealmingly the browser of choice: Google Zeitgeist [google.com].
Re:Looks like (Score:2)
Sorry, but who cares about IE? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Sorry, but who cares about IE? (Score:2)
thats because netscape just plain sucked. it crashed all the time. ie works fine for most people and the general mentality seems to be 'if its not broke, dont fix it'
Re:Sorry, but who cares about IE? (Score:4, Interesting)
What the techie crowd continues to forget is that the vast majority if computer users are now "appliance users". In the past, computers didn't become widely popular because it was impossible to pin down what a computer did. Toasters make toast. Dishwashers wash dishes. Computers.... er, compute. The popularity of the web and email in particular have transformed the computer into an appliance that enables email and provides eye candy. There are a dozen MUAs better than Lookout Express, too, but the same problem applies. You have to know there is a problem and it has to actively interfere with your normal usage before you will do anything about it. And the average user has been trained by years of unstable software, mutually incompatible drivers and endless virus/worm attacks to accept that this is just the normal state of the art. Until you find a way to convey to the average appliance-class user that there even is a problem with IE (or Windows, for that matter), Microsoft can do whatever they want and ignore any or all standards.
Now, if the majority of websites (where the techies have a bit more representation) were to start coding IE-hostile HTML without the beancounters' veto having an effect, there might be a possibility of getting the message across. Start with the pr0n sites.
Re:Sorry, but who cares about IE? (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe after the 10th web page with "Your browser doesn't support current standards!" they'll start to think about it.
This was the way of the WWW
The Great IE Lockout (Score:3, Insightful)
Think we can start a trend?
Needs vs. Profit (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Needs vs. Profit (Score:2)
Ian Hickson [hixie.ch]: About ten years from now, the de facto Web application standard will be Microsoft's Avalon and the
*shivers
I can help (Score:5, Interesting)
Read all the notes on w3schools.com [w3schools.com], and use google religiously when you have questions. Also, be sure to look at the CSS source code on csszengarden.com [csszengarden.com], because it can save you a lot of time to learn through example. Keep it simple, too.
> I've managed to get my head around XHTML, but when I try to use CSS, I have trouble doing even the most basic layouts that could easily be achieved with s.
I had the same problem, until I ditched tables for div tags and css classes. Using the id tag is the key to getting layout right, and nesting your divs correctly will help too.
Start with one container div that holds everything, and that's your page. Give it an id class like: id="container", and in CSS, use the # symbol to identify it.
for example (in the CSS file or style tag):That would be for an id tag in your div: > I can understand why Slashdot still uses them.
They kinda have to at this point. The Slash system is too entrenched in HTML to change direction. Why? Because many comments would break XHTML, and there is no point using CSS without using XHTML, IMHO.
> With CSS, nothing seems to 'just work' on every browser. The W3C specs are confusing. And there's no decent HTML/CSS editor (as in the Dreamweaver kind, not the Vim kind) that I know of for Linux, so it has to be done by hand or elsewhere (Wine/Windows, et cetera).
I recommend doing everything by hand. You'll learn more and your code won't break as much, and you can quickly repair it if you know your system well. Or you could just download a package that lets you quickly post news to your site without having to change your templates every page. I've created one at sourceforge called Gemsites that will be releasing a 2.0 version soon, and while Gemsites used to be a Slash clone, it's now a standards compliant blog/photoblog package.
> What's the best way for a n00b like myself to learn and use CSS in the real world, where some people use Mozilla, some use Opera and Konqueror, and a lot of people use Internet Explorer?
Talk to people like me over email [zenbuzz.org] and I'll help you.
Re:I can help (Score:3, Interesting)
The difference is if you get this stuff wrong in XHTML, the browser won't render it at all (although none of them actually validate, so you're only checking well-formedness here; missing an alt won't do much); HTML gives the browser far more opportunity to render even malformed content, which frankly is a good thing for users.
I have a Po
Re:Needs vs. Profit (Score:5, Interesting)
Then a bit later test in IE and smack your forehead when you realise how backwards it is in supporting simple css.
Mod Parent Down (Score:5, Insightful)
Statements like this illuminate a kind of ineptitude that is too revealing for a place like Slashdot. If you dislike CSS or you have had a hard time using it... if you are frustrated with it: ask for help, or just simply state that you are frustrated. Don't bash the standard because you have had a hard time with it.
The templates on csszengarden.com [csszengarden.com] are all created by graphic artists who believe in CSS and what it can do. They don't spend months on each template. In fact, I find it easier to create fast, graphically appealing websites with XHTML/CSS than I have ever created with HTML and Microsoft-friendly tag attributes. It all comes down to compliance and follwing the rules. Maybe CSS needs some refinement, and that I won't debate, but to bash the whole standards seems rather uninformed.
> A good example of the futility of working with the CSS standard is Jeffrey Zeldman's site www.zeldman.com. This site has been through so many redesigns yet inevitably each new redesign breaks in some major browser or other.
Maybe he's redesigned it so many times because it's fast and easy to do so? Part of the problem with many standards is when designers try to take it too far. They should all just keep it simple and the results will be better; there will be less trouble. The web is for information distribution, and therefore it's quite possible to create an appealing website that doesn't break browsers.
The trouble with standards, starts and stops with the browsers that try to change the standards to support some kind of corporate domination theory. When browsers support standards, the way they were meant to be supported, browsers wouldn't break when reading sites designed with standards.
IE Standards (Score:2, Interesting)
Microsoft's whole goal in the IE/Netscape war was to make its webpages incompatible with Netscape. We still see crap like that today.
I think the only hope for actually implementing web standards lies in demonstrating the superiority of products like Mozilla Firefox [mozilla.org]. Don't expect any development from Microsoft on this front; the more exclusive they can make their browser, the better (in their eyes).
I don't expect to Longhorn/the new IE giving anything helpful to web standards.
Web standards time warp (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Web standards time warp (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Web standards time warp (Score:3, Interesting)
I gave up support for non-CSS browsers a long time ago (excepting Lynx, my pages are still Lynx-readable). CSS design is just so incredibly cleaner and more functional.
Not to mention that Moz and/or FireFox with certain extensions is such a pleasant testing environment, with resizing to different screen-sizes, validation testing, and deb
Re:Web standards time warp (Score:2)
Not to confuse web standards with css and xhtml. Even a table based design should be compliant with standards. It just means there's a standard
Web Standards (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Web Standards (Score:4, Informative)
See the bugs on the issue. In short, sites commonly test whether document.all exists to test for IE. Then if they detect it exists they commonly assume the following:
1) IE event model (which is totally different from
the W3C one).
2) VBScript support
3) IE CSS extensions support (filter, expression,
etc).
and so forth. So implementing document.all would in fact break a number of sites that work fine with Mozilla right now unless a whole slew of other IE stuff got implemented too.
Note that IE does getElementById fine, so you can just use the getElementById code for both browser....
The future is exiting (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm talking about the Semantic Web, which is an attempt to deal with the IMO biggest problem with the web, and especially searching the web for information: you can only search according to syntax. Words, regexes, etc. is really the best you can do right now.
Searching would be so much better if we had semantics. Semantics would make searches and web pages in general much easier for computers to index and relate to what is actually being searched for.
An example: searching for "a yellow car for sale in $CITY, with a cost between $VAL1 and $VAL2." would not give a lot of unusable results today, but the semantic web would return what is actually asked for.
Of course, all this is just theory, and a best-case scenario example. And there are lots of obstacles for the semantic web; many people are happy with the web as it is, and it will take a long time to implement it.
Probably, some ideas would be incorporated slowly into the web as we know it now.
WTF??? (Score:2)
I suppose there's nothing like a flamefest to get the circulation going.
Re:WTF??? (Score:4, Funny)
Go back to old standards if you want. You'll be going there without the bulk of the world, the clueless people, the corporate CEOs, the spammers, the ...
... oh wait
... wait for me!
Marketing (Score:5, Interesting)
Mozilla, and Open Source in general has an amazing window of opportunity right now. A product tie in like the one described in the article is exactly what is needed.
IE looks as if it will remain stagnant for at least another couple of years. If there is a Mozilla marketing arm, they should be jumping in with both feet.
Similarly, now is the time for Open Office to get the MS Word compatibility bugs sorted out and to mount a big attack on the corporate sector.
If the Open Source community waits another year or two MS will steamroller them with the latest and greatest MS OS and Office packages. If they jump now and can find backers to finance PR and advertising, groups like Mozilla could make major gains.
Re:Marketing (Score:3, Informative)
There is. Go to the Mozilla Marketing Project and take a look. [mozilla.org]
To submit a marketing request, go to the main Bugzilla database, and select Marketing as the category. [mozilla.org]
Getting IE up to Standards (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe I'm Getting Old (Score:5, Insightful)
This article paints a gloom picture, but no one seems to see the light.
If Microsoft wants to wait to release a new browser then this merely opens a nice hole for increased market penetration.
The gap will fill, but not if people complain Microsoft is not innovating.
Re:Maybe I'm Getting Old (Score:2)
However, their boss of the era has recently been bragging [os2irc.org] about his "wisdom" of killing off their superior product (despite resistance and against the advice of those who bui
Already IE marketshare is slipping (Score:4, Interesting)
As long as we keep telling everyone that there is an alternative superior to IE, they will begin using it. Eventually, people will have to build websites for Mozilla, and then we will be back to the IE/Netscape wars. Except this time, nothing new will be coming from Microsoft for several years.
I strongly suggest we build our websites with XHTML and CSS and ignore IE. We can put a message on our sites "We have detected that you are using IE. We require a standards based browser. Please download Mozilla, Firebird, or Opera."
Re:Already IE marketshare is slipping (Score:4, Interesting)
According to this W3 site [w3schools.com], IE 5 and 6 combined is down to 82.3%, and Mozilla is up to 10.7%.
Re:Already IE marketshare is slipping (Score:3, Interesting)
Gloomy... _TOO_ gloomy... (Score:5, Insightful)
This article brings up many good points about IE's potential of totalitarian rule over the internet in the future, but I feel that it lacks insight on certain predictions, especially those regarding longhorn.
For one, the time it will take for longhorn to be widely adopted isn't factored into this hypothesis at all. It's 2004, that means its something around 4 years since the release of Windows XP. But is it as ubiquitous as this author claims it is? Absolutely not. It costs a lot of money to upgrade a whole mess of computers to a new MS operating system, and many people just don't need to for whatever reason, so in many fronts, it hasn't been done. My high school has some 100-200 computers: some are brand spankin' new dells with XP, others are Windows 2000, and there are more than just a few OS 9 macs floating around there as well. M$ can't assume that longhorn's release - and subsequently the release of XAML, etc - will take web dominance even within four years. It will take much, much longer.
So do the math. We've had a year or so heads up on the threats that longhorn posits to the Interweb, we have 2 1/2 more at least until the sucker actually comes out, and then over 4 years for reasonable ubiquity of the OS to make developing all future websites in technologies like XAML, etc worthwhile. That's nearly a total of eight years for standards to be utilized and improved upon. There is no reason why technologies like XUL, CSS2.1 (or even 3), and SVG can't be the accepted norm before then. The word just needs to get out somehow, but that's another post altogether...
On another note, regarding his mentioning of a Google-branded mozilla or something thrown into the forray, that's just overkill. Just imagine if, instead, Google merely placed these words on the bottom list of links on its homepage:
Really, they'd only need to have it up there for what... a month? two weeks? for it to make a HUGE impact in IE's dominance. Imagine......
Re:Gloomy... _TOO_ gloomy... (Score:2)
Re:Gloomy... _TOO_ gloomy... (Score:5, Insightful)
The
1.
2. Once they migrate, they will love it so much that they'll never even consider a future alternative.
3. That once they make the development decision, it will be so compelling that they'll willingly shitcan their existing Linux/Apache installations, which are in many cases quite large.
4. That none of the revulsion that end-users feel towards over-the-internet Java apps will carry over to
5. That security will not be a concern.
I could go on, but even these five assumptions are not tenable. Does that mean no-one will use
But these Chicken Little scenarios are just completely f'ing off the wall.
Re:Gloomy... _TOO_ gloomy... (Score:2, Interesting)
Absurd! (Score:4, Insightful)
Heavens thats actually a good thing. It means that the other popular browsers, Mozilla/Firefox, Opera and others. Can continue to gain ground setting the standards that Longhorn+IE will have adhere to.
, what hope is there for innovation in CSS, SVG, XHTML and other web standards?
I'd say there is a good hope, Longhorn/IE will undoubtably break / embrace and extend web standards, probably offering some "revolutionary technology" which is infact a rehash of an existing standard butchered and twisted to work only in IE.
Is the future of the web similarly tied to Internet Explorer and Longhorn?
I sincerely hope not. Now is the time for web-developers to start building with upcoming standards and tools. Id like to see all browsers fully supporting SVG for a start. In this interim period of no new IE versions we have the ability to build and popularise the technologies that are available to us before they get the IE poisoning. It is, after all the tools developers decide to use that drives the future, and by pushing boundaries innovations can be realised.
Innovation in SVG? (Score:3, Insightful)
Safari and standards (Score:3, Interesting)
- Do you have iTunes on their Windows machine
Literally millions of people use a big chunk of Safari on Windows. It's the browser built into iTunes. It works today.
So arguably the quickest, most standards compliant browser around, which by the way is based on the open source
Blah. I was following this guy's argument until I came to this part. Are there seriously "millions" of windows users really using the iTunes browser ? That number seems a bit high given how many songs Apple has sold. Also, i'd challenge that Safari is even close to being the "most standards compliant browser" around. If you're working off a W3C checklist, I'd say Mozilla has it beat by a longshot, and makes a much more meaningful dent on the web applications side of things than Safari does, which is another big battle against IE altogether. I just can't believe that anybody really thinks for a minute that the whole future of the web and the battle of winning the hearts and minds of "millions" teeters on whether or not a browser supports CSS text shadows..More stuff? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm happy with web pages with pictures on them. In fact, uninvent Flash and I'll be even happier!
Re:More stuff? (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree. From the looks of some [asus.com] of the Flash widgets out there, you'd think people didn't realize that the word "Flash" was just a name and not an entire style guide.
Real GUI's (Score:2)
Who is "John"? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not saying that his musings aren't valid, but I'd like to know where he's coming from and what sort of relevant work he does that involves web standards. This would give the article more context and help me to understand better why he says what he does.
XHTML/SVG/CSS != Progress (Score:4, Insightful)
- An easy way to access information
- Simple, adhering to the lowest reasonable common denominator that works across all common browsers (HTML 4, limited CSS, etc.)
- Not filled with bloat and fluff that doesn't help me access information (such as flash intros, flash menus, Java menu crap, etc.)
Many of the webmonkeys I've known in my company that complain about such things not working are the same people who couldn't do HTML by hand if they wanted to, insist that beauty should take priority over functionality, and develop IE-only pages because they never thought to test any other browser and then blame those browsers for not supporting the latest, greatest standard. Here's a tip: if you want people to use your stuff, you have to provide it in a format their tools can understand. You can't expect everyone to upgrade, so you have to work to your audience.
Granted, I, too, would like to shoot everyone using NS 4.x, but there are still people out there running it and viewing my site at 640x480. I don't know how they can stand it, but it's their choice. My choice is to continue to support them as well as possible, for the moment. So I don't really concern myself with the new standards. Besides, for me, I have little to no use for them at the moment anyway.
IMHO, mis-applied Java and Flash are the worst two things that ever happened on the web. And those were both "innovations", especially the Java bit. So understand if I'm wary about any so called "improvements" to what already works pretty darn well and is just now starting to truly work the same (mostly) in most mainstream browsers.
That said, I run Fire(name this week) and, yes, I don't have the Flash plugin installed. F@#$ing hate flash. Bane of my existance.
Re:XHTML/SVG/CSS != Progress (Score:3, Insightful)
Cutesy animations? Annoy me. Fancy popping/flashing/over-under/etc. menus? Yup, those annoy me too. Intro animations that don't do anything useful, well, aside from
Safari: "Quickest, most standards compliant?" (Score:2)
My Idea (Score:3, Interesting)
Possibilities for Innovation (Score:5, Interesting)
Where he errs, IMHO, is in the assumption that innovation will be incremental. He seems to be implying that the most we can expect from the future of the web are some (gasp!) cool new CSS features.
I beg to differ. The future of the web will ride on the wave of two related trends, both of which have revolutionary rather than evolutionary implications:
- Increased client computing capacity - back in the mid-90s it was all the average PC could handle to render a complex HTML page. Nowadays PCs are at least one order of magnitude faster, and a lot of the processing currently relegated to the server could be offloaded to the client. The reason that this hasn't yet occurred is that no browser has the appropriate plugin architecture. It is possible to develop plugins for major browsers, but there is no proper framework to integrate these plugins into a cohesive whole. Instead, an increasing number of networked apps are eschewing the web browser altogether in order to provide a better user experience (e.g. IM, P2P file sharing, online gaming, VoIP, etc.).
- XML - for all the hue and cry, the only significant impact of XML on the web since its inception 6 years ago is RSS. RSS is certainly cool, but it's just one XML-based language, and the whole premise of XML is that it enables the creation of multiple vocabularies. So there's a huge opening for someone to create a browser that intelligently processes XML vocabularies. This would include managing the relevant XML schemas (perhaps using a centralized repository), rendering the XML in various ways (perhaps including HTML templates and autogenerated forms) and persistent storage/retrieval. This is basically the goal of RDF, but besides taking what I consider to be a number of unfortunate design decisions, the RDF designers have essentially ignored the need for a new browser architecture to make XML use on the web an attractive alternative to HTML.
None of this is easy, of course. But considering the potential rewards of owning the new new browser architecture, I have no fear whatsoever that innovation will stagnate just because Microsoft decides to take itself out of the game for a while.Nonetheless, most of these applications would be that much more valuable if they were integrated together. To achieve this, a platform is needed that permits inter-plugin communication: a shared data model, a high-level framework for UI development and way for plugins to exchange messages. Think Eclipse for networked apps instead of development tools and you'll be on the right track.
Your posit about XML having limited impact (Score:3, Interesting)
XML is integrated so deep into almost every technology available for internet development it is considered a ubiquitous skill for any level of developer.
WebServices are run by it.
Databases talk in it.
Office applications communicate with it.
Many large websites use it to render their entire sites.
And BTW the lofty platform/framework of which you speak is completed and needs only widespread adoption. It is the
Microsoft needs pressure... (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea of a Google branded browser based on Gecko would work. Especially if the Google desktop tools work best with this browser.
Getting Google to rank pages based on standards compliance would work (XHTML/CSS2+ design = higher page rank = more sites wanting compliance = less sites holding onto IE6 only designs.)
A Windows version of Safari might work. If an iTunes install put it on the system (like it does now with QuickTime) then people might use it -- hard to say if that would provide any market pressure though.
If something doesn't come along to shake up Microsoft (and it's got to be big, like the Internet in 1995) then things will not change in Redmond. At this point in time, Google is the only thing big and successful enough to rattle their cage.
-ch
Re:Microsoft needs pressure... (Score:3, Insightful)
Standards and style be damned.
The only thing I want to see from Google are pages ordered according to their relevance to my search. A page can be standards-compliant and content-empty.
IE is the hare, web standards the tortoise (Score:3, Interesting)
The browser wars are over. MS won, they achieved an absurd marketshare. A new war began while the smoke was still rising from the browser battlefield: the standards war.
I've noticed that all the ire, hated and derision that web developers held for Netscape 4 has in the last 18 months shifted to IE. Developers finally realize standards not only allow for cool things to be done, but also that those things only have to be done once. Chances are it won't work in IE. Avalon (the IE rendering engine) has barely changed since IE 5.0. Mozilla, Opera, and KHTML continue to implement standards released as far back as 1999 while IE arrogantly takes a nap within sight of the finish line. All of us need to stand along the race course with gatorade for the tortoise.
How to do that? Joe Public needs a reason to download a modern browser (which IE certainly isn't). When I tell people I haven't seen a popup in almost 3 years, the invariable gape is followed by some question akin to "How is that possible?" I've been using Mozilla as my regular browser since .8 was released. I point the soon to be former web victim toward Mozilla (not Firefox, because the next step is telling them how to avoid mail virii by not using outlook), and not once has anyone ever looked back. Evangelism is how web standards will be able to sneak past the sleeping hare to win the race. Or war, however one wished to view it.
Innovation is not a standard body's role (Score:3, Insightful)
The fact that the W3C tries to innovate is exactly why it is becoming less and less relevent in the real world.
IE hacks for PNG alpha blending / CSS fixes (IE7) (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm surprised that nobody (at least who's been modded up enough) seems to have said anything about two particular projects that attempt to deal with a couple of the main problems that developers tend to have with MSIE.
"IE7 [edwards.name]" is an Internet Explorer hack that parses standards-based CSS that you provide in a page, and mangles it so that earlier versions of IE display it how it's supposed to be displayed.
"PNG in Windows IE [ntlworld.com]" is a hack that tells IE to use a separate ActiveX control to load any PNG's in the page, instead of the internal image display code. This causes it to get alpha blending right. (I think there are a few variations of this hack around the web besides the one I've linked to.)
Both are javascript hacks that you can include at the top of a page and add the appropriate construct around them so that only IE will see them. Clearly they're not perfect, and I'd be edgey about using them in important websites without a lot more testing.
But has anyone actually used them effectively? How useful are they?
I've managed to get the PNG hack working, but I still haven't been able to get IE7 going. (Possibly something to do with the server sending the wrong MIME type.)
Maybe in the mobile space... (Score:2, Interesting)
XHTML-MP+SVGT11 Recommendations [vodafone.com]
Re:Oh! Oh! I know! I know! (Score:3, Informative)
What's new? Apparently a pop-up blocker, and extensions. (That sounds familiar.) Also they locked down the "default zone" so that if (when) a security breach occurs, a virus won't be running in a privileged security mode.
This all comes at a cost. Some old plug-ins don't work. At least that'll back the people off from bitching when Firefox 0.9 comes out
Re:web standards should ignore IE (Score:5, Interesting)
And that statement is based on what?
As a developer, I find XHTML to be a huge improvement on HTML - it just makes more sense. No more half-assed guesses as to whether or not a tag needs to be closed or VARIATIONS in tag name CASES that SEEM to BE randomly switched BETWEEN by CERTAIN web designers.
Tables are discouraged which means XHTML code written by a competent developer is much simpler, presentation and content are easier (but IMHO not yet easy enough) to separate so designers have an easier time of things, the structure of XHTML is consistent, unambiguous and - assuming you avoid going crazy with namespaces - easier on the eyes of a developer, and much more easily parsed.
So what exactly was your gripe with XHTML?
Re:web standards should ignore IE (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm guessing you're not actually a programmer? If you've ever written a program which parses HTML or decorates it in some way, you'd appreciate what a god-send it is to have a simple, consistent syntax for operating on the document tree. XHTML
Re:web standards should ignore IE (Score:2)
Most developers I know learn languages as they go, because there isn't the time nor money for a formal background in any particular language. A good CS degree or software/systems engineering background tends to make the choice of language irrelevant outside of what's the appropriate tool for the job.
Of course there is the occasionally shooting yourself in the foot when inexperienced with a langu
Re:web standards should ignore IE (Score:3, Insightful)
First of all, compact discs, like all the formats before them, were developed for one major purpose: to make you rebuy the music you already own. The record industry does this. Every few decades they switch to an entirely new format and make people buy their music all over again. We're due for a new format shortly, expect them to start pushing music dvd's like crazy (we're already seeing this, but expect it to get bigger and for dvd players to become essential components in a home stereo system)
Re:More than one way to look at it (Score:2)
Re:Stupid conclusion - waste of time (Score:2)
Re:Mozilla should try wayyyyy harder (Score:2)
Ditto for OpenOffice. UNO is great in the abstract but in practice it's extremely forbidding. It would be nice if they could work together on a single, XML-based cross-platform app delivery framework - they even have similar licenses - but...hell, you know the story.
Re:firebird (Score:4, Funny)
Micrsoft IS NOT going to use Mozilla, any hope that they will is just delusional.
Re:firebird (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:firebird (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:But what are standards? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's the difference between de jure and de facto standards. The only de jure standards are ISO publications. All others are de facto. Even the Internet (the RFCs) are de facto standards, not de jure standards.