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There's a movement afoot in the web development community that says it's time to move beyond standards and take the web to a new levels. Unhappy with the pace of innovation at the W3C, many developers are calling on browser manufacturers to go beyond supporting official W3C specifications and develop tools to support new features.
Before the standardistas among us cry foul, keep in mind that no one is suggesting that we throw away existing standards. Standards have given us a much improved web that's cross platform to a degree unimaginable a decade ago. Instead the argument is that for innovation on the web to speed up, it might take some non-standard tools to jump start the process.
One of the more outspoken critics, Alex Russell, creator of the Dojo Ajax toolkit, thinks that it's time to abandon the W3C as a source of web guidance. "Web developers in the 90's were looking forward, not backward, writes Russell on his blog, "I remember being excited about getting the chance to use new features and not caring who gave them to us."
In a followup reponse to Wired News, Russell adds he thinks the browser manufacturers already know that the web needs new features, but that "a strange side-effect of the standards
evangelism process has caused developers to put their faith in the W3C to the extent that the introduction of new things by browser vendors without standards-body blessing causes gnashing of teeth."
Jeff Croft, an HTML designer at Blue Flavor and longtime standards supporter, echos Russell's frustrations saying, "we've completely lost the innovative, experimental, lets-try-something-crazy attitude of web designers in the 90s, because we're too damn concerned about making things that are compliant."
Which of course isn't to say that we should stop making things compliant. As Croft writes in a comment on the Wired Blog Compiler, "I'm suggesting that we should be encouraging browser developers to continue innovating with new features alongside their standards implementations, with the idea that these new features can be standardized if they prove useful." And, as Croft points out, "one way to encourage that is to actually *use* said features."
In other words, web development ought to be pushing the boundaries of what's available rather than stopping at the limits of what's in the W3C specs.
Indeed many of the tools that have produced innovative new technologies on the web have come from sources outside the W3C. XMLHttpRequest, the backbone of Ajax technologies, was originally developed by Microsoft for Internet Explorer and later implimented by other browsers back when IE led the pack. XMLHttpRequest was then taken up by the W3C and is now overseen by the Web API working group.
But there are problems with simply setting browser manaufacturers loose and one need look no further than the W3C's CSS working group to see them. Microsoft has reportedly been stalling regarding new web fonts and yet at the same time Microsoft's Silverlight essentially allows the use of any TrueType Font, which as let some, including Russell to see this as Microsoft's bid to keep Silverlight ahead of standard HTML when it comes to font rendering.
Supporters of W3C argue that running out ahead of established web standards could see a result in what Chris Messina, who's worked with Mozilla and others, calls a "privileged web" run with proprietary tools like Silverlight and an "unprivileged web" still using standard open tools. Obviously that's a situation neither users nor developers want to see happen.
No one wants a return to the painful 1996 web with sites that only work in one browser, a problem largely solved by the creation of W3C an the specs it developed. After all they argue, we have all these great standards-based tools, why not stop and smell the HTML 4 for a while?
But the question is how long? QuoteTK HTML 5 progress.
segue
James Bennett has a thoughtful response to the debate on his blog where he argues that the choices so far on the table -- stay with web standards and learn to live with their development pace, or abandon them altogether in favor of the enthusiastic mob — are a false dilemma.
"The first thing we need to do," says Bennett, "is throw that out and recognize that there's actually a fairly broad continuum of options in between these two extremes; in other words, what we should be looking for is a balance between the input of people who use and develop for the Web, and people who develop browsers and attendant technologies."
And Bennett isn't worried about Microsoft. Citing some examples of how IE7 was in fact largely a result of Microsoft being forced to play catchup with Firefox, Opera and Safari, Bennett concludes that "Microsoft really isn't relevant to the future of web standards."
What's more, he argues, "any compelling new development that comes from the rest of the industry will be just another form of fire and motion, and Microsoft will have no choice but to keep pace, regardless of whether they participated in the process."
Chris Messina likewise has another approach and points to "community convention" projects like Microformats, OpenID and OAuth, which have all evolved quickly and dynamically without the blessing of the W3C. "These projects to me represent the way the web needs to, says Messina. "It's tenuous certainly, but it's driven by a real market, with fits and spurts, and moments of genius and ingenuity, rather than by artificial forces that trend towards
stagnation and denovation — because enterprises, like the government, are incented to avoid change and evolution."
I like this quote but I don't know what to do with it: Janet Daly, W3C Global Communications Officer, says, "the web's greatest gift is that everybody gets to call it their own."
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