Linked by Adam S on Fri 11th Jul 2008 04:37 UTC, submitted by peskypescado
A recent post about Firefox and my general view of corporations and organizations has caused a bit of a stir. It even caught the attention of Asa Dotzler. He said "It's really hard for me to believe that either [Microsoft or Adobe] have the free and open Web at heart when they're actively subverting it with closed technologies like Flash and Silverlight." But are they really subverting it? Where exactly is the line between serving the consumer and subverting the web? I think the W3C should share in this blame.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
If other people have other agendas, they are going to go off and do them, regardless of what the W3C are up to.
It doesn't help when things take so long for standards to become standards; just look at OpenGL and the effect that its dawdling it has had on the gaming marketplace. Microsoft jumped up and promised game companies they would no longer have to be held hostage to the slow progress of OpenGL - and offered DirectX as an alternative. As they say, the rest is now history.
The w3c is a standards committee that can make strong decisive action when required - and for it not to be held to the whims of the individual members, because lord knows, there are a number of members in there who will scuttle any possible attempt to improve the status quo.
True, but at the same time, when it takes *YEARS* for standards to develop, there are some major bottlenecks that need to be removed - lets also remember that this extension of the standard is hardly new.
Netscape did it years ago when fighting Microsoft by introducing extensions to IIRC Javascript which few took advantage of. Microsoft extended HTML with some useful enhancements (image trying to get some of those through the standards committee - no matter how good they are!) and developers took advantage of them (because they were useful).
Unfortunately it is the chicken and egg scenario with vested interest thrown in for good luck. When you are Microsoft, and your 'trojon horse' is Silverlight, and yet, there are technologies that negate Silverlight in the form of open standards - who do you think is going to win? that is why Internet Explorer is so horrendiously broken. Quite frankly, what I would have loved to see is completely throw away all backwards compatibility and make IE 8 100% standards compliant with all the web standards, and simply provide extended support to IE 7 - then kill it off in a year. I
f companies can't be bothered upgrading their internal applications and website owners are too lazy to do that job - tough is all I say.