Discuss: Web Standards 2008: Three Circles of Hell

by Molly E. Holzschlag

31 business model for standard setting organizations

Its interesting to see how even a open standard advocate feels the tension between financing a standard setting organization (SSO) and proprietary technologies. But what could be the solution?

I think you should just have a look at other SSOs way of working. AFAIK, e.g. at ISO there are three solutions.
1. the standards are only “relatively” open in the sense that you have to pay to use them. This is called a (F)RAND agreement, and was rejected by the W3C. (I think rejection was a good decision)
2. even in ISO a phenomenon called RAND-Zero gains terrain. This is actually equivalent to Royalty Free licensing, just like W3C requires. In these cases it is the standard manager’s duty to finance the standard. (e.g. in the case of OOXML it is Microsoft)
3. ISO has paying services. The most obvious one is the stamp an implementation that it really conforms to the standards. Actually, W3C has a similar tool, but it is free, it’s called validator.w3.org.

Moreover, you might start looking back at the dawn of the internet era. According to many studies, the main action that lead to a unique and open net is a US government decision that every university’s connection to the net will be financed as long as they choose a “ready-to-be-open” internet provider.

I am in Europe, and here I think it is possible to “force” governments to require by law that every government agency should support these and these standards. Depending on the breadth (are state run universities included?) the market will adjust.

posted at 10:09 am on September 24, 2008 by Viktor Nagy

32 W3C dilly dallying

Nothing demonstrates this more than Internet Explorer. Nothing demonstrates this more than Apple’s bid to implement aspects of CSS3, that have not yet been passed as recommendations.

Maybe if the W3C didn’t take an age to publish their standards companies like Apple wouldn’t need to implement non-recommended features. Apple et al want to push the web forward but it often seems like the W3C are just wanting to hold it back.

posted at 12:17 pm on September 24, 2008 by Matt Newboult

33 Internet - the only pure democracy

I strongly believe that Internet is the only authentic democracy ever created. Everyone contribute, no one has control. I believe that the lack of standards in the past doesn’t stop web from it’s evolution. In fact, I think that diversity is the key of web evolution and not standardization. All circles described in the article have significant impact on the future development and standardization of the web. However the standardization as a purpose is one of the best process while the standards are not so important.
As you know, the chase is better than the catch, plans are nothing while planing is everything, the perfection is nothing compared to pursuit of perfection.
An evolution is created by the process of standardization not by standards. Keep up the excellent work and continue to me a small mechanism that move the web ahead. Bother less about standards and unsolved issues and admire a little bit what we create: the actual web.
Nobody and everybody can take credit for this.

posted at 03:24 pm on September 24, 2008 by Radu Davidescu

34 So Many Interesting Perspectives

I’m loving the comments here, thank you all! I will be back to respond in detail as I’m able.

Little anecdote for some levity (since some readers thing the article has a bit of doom and gloom in it).

I heard the term “Fresh Hell” for the first time via the character of Sheldon from the silly but endearing show “The Big Bang Theory” – I thought there was some good subtext there what with the collider issueat CERN, the fact that Sheldon is a physicist . . . turns out the quote originated from Dorothy Parker as the excellent editorial staff here at ALA found during fact checking.

I still wish it coulda been Sheldon though :)

posted at 04:00 pm on September 24, 2008 by Molly E. Holzschlag

35 Responses to Page 1 Comments

@Julian “WHATWG’s economic model is that a lot of the ‘volunteers’ are actually vendor backed (Apple, Mozilla, Opera, at least)”

This is an extremely important point and I’m glad you brought it up. I don’t believe it was originally that way, but became that way over time. I might be completely wrong, in which case someone please correct me! Nevertheless, it’s definitely the way things are going now so bears watching IMO.

@Al: Community approach is very idealistic, and therefore appealing to me. One of the reasons I used circles in the metaphor for this article is to suggest that each of these circles offer up people, resources and a variety of skills. Finding the middle circle (I wanted a Venn diagram but Zeldman forbade it ;)) is a huge part of that concern – that we realize we ARE a community and act as one.

Ideals aside, alas I’m not convinced that this would be any easier to achieve in any reasonable period of time than let’s say the dissolution of all borders and a completely communitarian global world where economy, resources and people move freely and peacefully.

I think we need to work with what we have and avoid ADDING more layers of stuff, at least for now.

@Loughlin: I think those cracks started to appear somewhere around 1994 – which ironically is the year the W3C was formed. I would very much prefer to see the W3C reorganize and be run more efficiently than scrapped. I know that many people there are working very hard to find ways to do just that.

@Stephen: Very important point you bring up regarding apps versus “pages” – there is work going on wrt web application specs, I don’t know too much about it but if you hop over to the W3C you can find the public list and information about what’s going on there in terns of Web Apps. Also, HTML5 was originally conceived to BE application-centric. Within the W3C HTML5 (along with EcmaScript, a strong document object model, and related technologies) is really set up to be a player within a W3C-led web application platform.

Reminds me of a quote I got from Dean Edwards [dean.edwards.name] for a presentation, I’ll share it here because it’s very telling reading something like this from a person who spends most of his time with script:

“HTML5 tries to be the best of both worlds: a better HTML but a forward looking, webcentric HTML that knows about the web and
its quirks If HTML had been properly specified and implemented in the first place then HTML5 would be considered an upgrade. As it stands, HTML5 is a rewrite. That difference is pretty f**king fundamental.” (censorship mine out of consideration for the publication)

@Richard: “The main thing is to ensure that Microsoft acts responsibly.” I’d personally include quite a few other companies and groups in there. I apologize if I sound like I’m complaining. I’m not just complaining, my concern is very genuine and clearly felt by many as well. You got it in one – I feel very frustrated and unsure what to do. All the more reason to have these discussions and share ideas. By the way, I, too, lament the fact that many people do not take advantage of the availability of Chris Wilson and others at Microsoft. It’s a fantastic opportunity. I wonder what causes the low turn out? Lack of awareness? Lack of care? It’s Microsoft? Hmm.

@Jim: If something doesn’t exist, how can it fail? ;)

@Beth: Acting locally, sharing resources and skills, etc. is a very good thing to do and I applaud your efforts.

@Fred: “I just want to stop having to spend hours adjusting css to accommodate these different browsers.” There are a few good bits of news on this front. The CSS working group is building an impressive shared test suite that all interested will be free to use – exactly the way we can work toward more consistent user agent implementations. The other helpful technique of which you are probably aware but I’ll put it here just in case others aren’t is to consider CSS Reset both yahoo user interface library and Eric Meyer [meyerweb.com] offer up reset information and actual code for you to work with to.

Very interesting discussion thus far, and I’ll respond by page as I am able. Thank you for being so willing to share experience, opinions and ideas. -M

posted at 05:23 pm on September 24, 2008 by Molly E. Holzschlag

36 Untitled

I hear your frustration! I do not design or code pages on a daily basis. Instead I spend my days trying to convince high school students that there are standards or best practices for web design that they need to pay attention to. Figuring out exactly what the standards and best practices are is a full time job in itself.

posted at 10:20 pm on September 24, 2008 by Debbie Smith

37 There ain't no such thing as a standard here...

The root problem is actually there isn’t such a thing as a proper standard.

From day 1, browser manufacturers have bent over backwards to display whatever code happens to be out there as legibly as possible. It stems from the ethos of the early: amateur publishing. Sure, we can all install WordPress these days but is Auntie Val, publishing her homecooked blog since 1999 going to bother?

All those nested tables, unclosed paragraphs and <blink> tags are still out there – billions upon billions of them. Is any browser vendor ever going to be brave enough to release a version that says “this page cannot be displayed due to invalid code?” The answer is “no” – but without that you have no standards.

I hate XML, but that is a standard. You miss a tag out there and it just breaks. If HTML/CSS had been treated like that from the start then we might be getting somewhere. There’s a lot of blame pointed at browser vendors, but here’s the rub: they don’t have a proper standard to go by, and if they did strictly go by it no-one would use their product if every second page refuses to display.

posted at 04:48 pm on September 25, 2008 by Paul C

38 Clients lack of understanding and resistance to ch

I came into a site with ancient html corrupted coding & highly interactive, and was supposed to update the look and feel using specs from a computer generated nested table coding that was incorrect.

I merged two sets of incorrect coding into one, with the understanding that this was quick and dirty and we would go and update to standards based coding, and let the browsers smooth over the incorrect coding.

I have created a standards based layout (looks exactly the same) that I use on 20% of the site, but get tremendous resistance to integrate more of the site.

The client likes it and the engineers I work with are focused on back end interactive and don’t see the importance of changing.

posted at 05:06 pm on September 25, 2008 by Nancy Johnson

39 Standards, not as important as they may seem

Are w3c standards that important ? Check up popular websites

Are they all w3c validated ?

Yes, it’s part of the evolution of web design… but it’s just a small part of web design.

posted at 01:39 am on September 26, 2008 by XEN AXON

40 on funding

working in a large bureaucratic non-profit organization I can imagine how difficult it can be to operate the w3c.

why doesn’t it raise money directly from users? if 1% of web users donated a single dollar for a better open web, its financial woes would be considerably eased.

Regarding proprietary technologies, I find that MS never succeeded to win the web despite being in the best position to do so. I’d argue that no vendor will ever enjoy a 97% market share of a mission-critical component, be it hardware, OS, browser, search etc. When IE6 dominated the browser market with its own interpretation of web standards, users demanded an alternative and mozilla picked up.

we need web standards. W3C has historic legitimacy to set them.

posted at 12:11 pm on September 26, 2008 by jerome cukier