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.

Alex Barnett blog : community, IE

The Web Standards Fluster Cuck

The Future of Mozilla Matters