Alex Barnett blog : IE

The Web Standards Fluster Cuck

alexbarnett — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 00:58:00 GMT

Clucking bell, Molly Holzshlag really has kicked the web standards beehive with a blog post expressing her great discontent with the W3C and WaSP.

Ridiculously Inadequate Backgrounder

Now, before you head off and read the post and the 60+ comments, here's a bit of background on why I find this post of interest (and rather depressing):

I've been following Molly's work for a while now. She first came on to my radar when after providing an update on the progress made between the Microsoft IE, VS and .NET teams and the Web Standards Project (WaSP). That was in 2005. Then in January 2007, I noted Molly's announcement that she had left WASP to join the IE team on a contract basis to work on standards and interoperability issues. I was pleased to see the IE team was making a real effort.

Entirely seperately, but not entirely, in October of 2006 Tim Berners-Lee called for the reinvention of HTML. His call to action caused a bit of a hoo-ha at the time. What's that got to do with Molly? Well, as noted, some of the reactions to TBL's post varied from skepticism, to 'About time!' - and here's the connection with Molly's latest post - to what role the WHATWG will play in what presumably could be a competing effort to the HTML 5 (or XHTML5) spec in progress at the time. However, I was pleased to hear TBL's public calling for progress and hoped we might see some of this progrss after HTML's 8-year stagnation. Then in July 2007, we had the news that HTML5 was being considered by the W3C.

Confused? You should be.

So after my ridiculously inadequate backgrounder, you can now go ahead and read Molly's post, along with the contributions be the cast of characters (the commenters), some of whom are affiliated with various competing factions wrestling with the future of web standards and HTML, who somehow manage to converge the various threads (now including a Fear of Air, the Semantic Web, microformats, Silverlight, XML, community, accessibility, transparency and who-knows-what-else) into what looks like a complete political mess (read: fluster cuck).

Yes, it is depressing,, but such is the business of web standards agreement. A messy business indeed...There's even a YouTube video covering the drama - HTML5 trailer - Find your Hero.

Thanks to Thomas Vander Wal for the link to Molly's post.

The Future of Mozilla Matters

alexbarnett — Fri, 11 May 2007 11:20:00 GMT

What does a microformat-aware web browser look like? Richard MacManus has some of the answers, summarizing this presentation made by Alex Faaborg at the Web 2.0 Expo event a couple of weeks back. Cool, eh?

Interesting, but this use of microformats in the browser is only a small fraction of the overall story in the future of the 'interesting' web. The web's possibilities, the web's multiple possible futures and the role the browser has to play in the future of the dynamic web moving forward isn't entirely clear today (the web's future is always somewhat hazy - it's what makes it interesting). There are many paths we could go down, some better than others.

To this point, Richard also points to Chris Messina's vlog post, where Chris shares his thoughts and concerns regarding Mozilla's future, in particular proprietary web tech trends / stacks such as Silverlight, Apollo and the more recently announced JavaFX by Sun - each offering is essentially acting as an alternative to AJAX.

Chris also discusses Mozilla the platform and not Mozilla the browser (see Ryan Stewart's reaction here and Anne Zalenka's thoughts here on this topic), XUL in Mozilla, the spreadfirefox effort, HTML5, Mozilla as a platform (again), the civicforge idea, XForms, HTML5 (again), XHTML2.0, microformats and Mozilla's leadership role with these technologies amongst the web dev community, IE's progress, mobile browsers - minimo vs. webkit, openid and more.

The video provides a great insight into how a key Mozilla community member sees the future of Mozilla as a ~~product~~ platform and the role Mozilla has to play in defining the future of the web. It is also a fairly frank assessment of Mozilla's progress and role the Mozilla community has in its future. Thanks for recording and sharing this Chris, I learnt a lot here.

The Molly and IE story keeps getting better

alexbarnett — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 06:41:00 GMT

Molly E. Holzschlag, formerly of the Web Standards Project (WASP) has joined the IE team on a contract basis to work on standards and interoperability issues.

"I’m very excited to announce that I will be working to advance standards and interoperability education and outreach. The goal is essentially two fold:
To provide resources to Web designers and developers (including internal developers at Microsoft) as they work toward a more standards-oriented goal - no matter which tools and technologies are being used. [....] We’ll also be doing hands-on tutorials, continuing with our chat series, and I’ll be blogging a column called “The Daily Molly” which will provide short news, tips and tricks, and items of interest to the community
To work with Microsoft as well as all browser and tools vendors. It is my desire that persistence coupled with diplomacy will assist us all in moving to a time where interoperability becomes the heart of the Web again"

Pete LePage, Product Manager for IE has shared his thoughts on the role Molly will be taking on while on the team:

"When Molly and I first started talking about what her role would entail, I explained to her I wanted to hire Molly, not "Microsoft Molly", but Molly. She isn't going out and pimping things, and she's not going to be telling you things she doesn't believe in, she still be out working to make the web a happier place for all web designers and developers to be."

There's a good working history between Molly (via WASP) and Microsoft. So anything that can be done to get more focus on the standards work required for IE is great news for users, web designers, developers and especially testers....

Good luck Molly!

Microsoft - giving back the web?

alexbarnett — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 19:55:00 GMT

Quick backgrounder: In October of last year, Tim Berners-Lee called for a renewed effort to progress the HTML standard from its current version (HTML 4.01) ratified by the W3C eight years ago. More recently, the WHAT-WG, an independent group was established, emerging out of the frustration with the lack of progress made by the W3C. Since October, some progress has been made by the WC3 in that they are chartering a new HTML Working Group and have appointed a new chair - Chris Wilson, Program Manager on the IE team at Microsoft.

In December, Daniel Glazman expressed his concerns with the new HTML WG, including those regarding the appointment of Chris as the new chair of the W3C's HTML WG - the main thrust of his argument being that having a Microsoft employee and a major browser vendor in this key position would encourage poor feedback from the press and the community:

"If I do trust entirely the individual Chris Wilson for the chair of this Working Group, it's with deep concern I see a major browser vendor take the chair of the most visible WG in the Consortium. From my point of view, desktop browser vendors should be banned from the chair of that Group, to avoid (a) bad feedback from the press and the community (b) avoid issues between the WG and the chairman's parent company about the directions taken by the Group. I know Microsoft already had W3C chairs in the past - or even present - but the HTML WG is different in its very high visibility, and I certainly fear the "Microsoft puts its hand on HTML" press articles we're going to face."

Today, Chris Wilson has posted his response to Daniel Glazman's concerns.

I've been out of the tech news loop in the last month and so completely missed that fact that Chris was made chair of the new group, but I think his appointment is very good news for the future of HTML and for the web as a whole. Now, you could say "well, you work for Microsoft, so you would say that". That's hard to argue with. But let me know why I think it's a good thing.

As TBL pointed out, the progress of the official HTML spec has been in a mire for nearly a decade and it's no secret that up to very recently, Microsoft's implementation in IE of web standards has been nothing short of appalling. Since the development of IE7, things have improved in this respect, but they aren't perfect.

Having the Microsoft IE team align with web standards and rid web developers and designers of the overhead that comes with having to design for a broken rendering environment has been wished for by many for years. Microsoft's past distance and lack of engagement in the web standards process was hurting the web: its the users, the developers and owners of websites. The overhead was real. Prior to joining Microsoft I worked at a web development and design agency for seven years and know too well the grief this caused to our team. Cussing Microsoft was literally part of the daily routine as testers reported 'bugs' that weren't actually bugs.

It is why Firefox has done so well - the community's response has been to 'take back the web', a concept that truly resonated with the tech community. Through Firefox, Microsoft has realized that conforming to web standards has to be a priority and not an afterthought. Recent efforts such as Microsoft working with WASP on web standards are steps in the right direction, as has IE7's progress with CSS. But these recent efforts have been about making things work on current specs and standards. We also need to look ahead, and that future needs to have Microsoft's involvement. Personally, I'm not worried about the concerns Daniel has around the media's response to the fact that a Microsoft employee is chair of HTML WG - frankly, WC3's reputation relating the the HTML spec couldn't be any worse than it is today. The only way is up.

The anti-microsoft crowd are anti for a number of reasons and one legitimate reason has been Microsoft's historical disrespect of web standards. As I see it, by having Chris in this position Microsoft is making the biggest commitment it can to respecting web standards in the future. That has to be a good thing for all of us.