Open Web: Fifteen year old third grader?

05.06.08Posted by Ben in Flash, Flex, miscellany, pointless blatherComments Off

I don’t really want to get fully involved in the discussion being had by Ryan Stewart, Asa Dotzler and Simeon Bateman. However, in reading through each argument a few things Asa said struck me as particularly indicative of the fact that he, and I suppose maybe Mozilla as a whole, simply don’t get it. I am admittedly cherry picking here, but I couldn’t resist pulling out a few quotes.

Open is developing the protocols and specifications in a co-operative and participatory environment and then competing on implementations.

Replace “Open is” with “The colossal headache that is developing consistent experiences that are cross browser/platform and engaging to users is thanks to” and you’ve got a true statement. I use Firefox as my primary browser and think overall its a great application but unfortunately, telling a client their new site looks great in Firefox and like garbage in IE won’t exactly result in a lucrative career. Developing for “competing implementations” sucks, and its a large part of why Flash Player is so widely embraced and successful.

If I was in Adobe’s shoes, I’d give everything away, all of it. Hell, I’d pay people to develop on the Adobe platform and I’d encourage dozens of competing implementations of my platform across every type of device imaginable because, in the end, it’d be my platform and I’d decide how and when it evolved and to what ends.

See above for my thoughts on competing implementations.

So, all I can do in this battle for the future of the Web is to advocate for advances in real open Web standards from groups like ECMA, W3C, and WHATWG. It may be a bit slower to market, (hopefully not too much slower,)…

A bit slower? Seriously? Just a bit? Far as I can tell HTML 4.01 was finalized in December of 1999. Nineteen ninety freakin’ nine. Best I can tell the latest Flash Player back then was version 4. So in the 9 YEARS we’ve been stuck with HTML 4 there have been 5 full version releases of Flash Player. If thats a bit then I am just a bit shy of being a billionaire. Yes, Firefox has had a few releases in that time but it wasn’t adding any new capabilities, just improving its implementation of the same old spec.

So be patient everyone, for by 2011 you will almost certainly have a finalized HTML 5 spec and, not only that, your choice of no less than 4 major implementations of it to choose from!

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aaron

“Work on HTML 5 is rapidly progressing, yet it is still expected to continue for several years. Due to the requirement to produce test cases and achieve interoperable implementations, current estimates have work finishing in around ten to fifteen years.”

10 to 15 years? Great, so by the time I can use the Flash player to do real-time raytracing, I’ll be able to replace with in my HTML content. Oh, whoops, that’s not true, because it will probably take around 5 more years for HTML5 capable browsers to reach market saturation! Guess I’m stick with tags for a few more decades.

If it’s going to take 10 to 15 years for the next HTML spec to come out, I think we can safely assume that the W3C has surrendered the future of the web to the private sector. Good riddance
aaron

Oops, looks like some characters were stripped in the first message. Meant to say:

Great, so by the time I can use the Flash player to do real-time raytracing, I’ll be able to replace “div id=’header’” with “header” in my HTML content.
http://www.swfflex.com Christopher Keeler

True. Now if we can just get Flash player to be search engine friendly, we wouldn’t even need HTML.