Web Standards
dcurt.is
dcurt.is
First you get things working. Then you standardize on them.
Complain when the Webkit team refuses to implement standards. Have they shown any unwillingness to support W3C standards once published? No? Then what's the gripe? The browser vendors are doing exactly what they're supposed to do: come up with new things. If the W3C was doing its job, it would watch those new things carefully and, when enough momentum existed, start ratifying them as standards.
It's not enough to say, "you could have used the same argument to defend Internet Explorer". To indict someone for "embrace & extend", you need both halves of the behavior: creation of new features, and unwillingness to support subsequent standards for those features.
Unfortunately for your argument, the answer is indeed no. Apple is unwilling to support standards for touch events, due to its patent war against Android.
Sources:
[1] http://9to5mac.com/2011/12/19/apple-submits-invalid-patents-...
[2] http://www.webmonkey.com/2011/12/is-apple-using-patents-to-h...
Either way, I can hold two thoughts in my head at the same time: that Apple is indeed retarding standardization of touch events, while the W3C is retarding... everything else --- and then complaining about it.
I do think it is fair to say that Apple is a key player in the W3C's issues, along with Microsoft.
It's a situation very much like the UN, where people opposed to the idea of cooperation use their lack of cooperation as proof of the idea that collaborative action is infeasible. Apple really wants people to use their walled garden as much as possible, so they are definitely among the parties intentionally sabotaging the W3C process.
Eight years ago one might have called Java one of the most successful open source projects ever. Webkit could easily end up in a similar position. Given Apple's heavy litigation of their opponents, it seems almost inevitable.
So, the game has barely even begun yet. I suggest we revisit in 10 years and see how successful Webkit has been, for Apple, and our broader software community. (Because simply saying it is a success definitely suggests different things to different groups.)
1. The WebKit team wasn't involved
2. Nobody was failing to support a published standard
Was somebody pulling a dick move in the article you posted? Yes. But it was a different group pulling a different dick move than the one tptacek asked about. If you want to argue that Apple's lawyers are a disagreeable lot, I suppose that's a valid point you could make, but this is not the thread for it.
Both the browser vendors and the W3C could be doing a better job. But neither is really the problem here.
The problem is that WebKit, a single implementation, is utterly dominant in the mobile space (except for Opera on low-end phones in the far east). This isn't a criticism of WebKit. Any single implementation that becomes so dominant is bad.
Any single implementation, once it has vendor prefixed stuff in release builds, will lead to the problems the mobile web has now: People will use the vendor prefixes, after which that implementation can't remove them without breaking websites. And after that, other vendors will be forced to implement those prefixes in order to render the web in a non-broken way.
One way to avoid that is for vendors to not vendor prefix at all in release builds, but all browsers do that. If that is out, the only thing that can save us is for no single implementation to become dominant. But WebKit won on mobile - Android and iOS are by far the leaders, and both use WebKit; in fact, even most of the runners up do (Blackberry, Bada, WebOS, etc.).
My only criticism of WebKit is that, when it saw itself becoming so dominant, it should have been much more careful with vendor prefixing, preferably stopping doing so entirely in release builds. It's ok to vendor prefix when you have a competitive market, but if you do so when you are dominant or about to be, you end up with the current debacle.
All of this is true on mobile phones today. And it's getting worse over time rather than better. If you want to build a browser that provides decent compatibility with popular mobile websites, you have little choice but to emulate WebKit's experimental (and often unspecified) features.
[Disclosure: I work for Mozilla on Firefox for Android, and as the editor of the W3C Touch Events spec.]
During the emptiness, technologies like alpha-transparent PNGs started out but never got anywhere because the gorilla didn't support it and what were you going to do? We got this idea to create layouts without using tables, but oops, box model bugs, I sure was glad to be working around the legacy of the days of innovation, and hey, wouldn't position:fixed be great? You had upstart browsers that couldn't access many websites because in the happy days of innovation the web decided that if (document.all) elseif (document.layers) was a decent way of writing code and it's not like anyone was going to rewrite those. Remember that innovative native client technology a whole bunch of banks and DRM sites decided could be good for secure, controlled internet experience? I think they called it ActiveX, sure did wonders for usability and practicality of actually innovating browsers that could not support it.
You say we've learned from our mistakes but to me the use of -webkit- and continued use of user agent sniffing (buggy, natch) suggests otherwise. Who'll be updating those sites two years from now, when Firefox Mobile's or X Mobile's rendering engine is the innovative stuff all developers love?
Committees are not the right process for innovation. 10 years of overly complicated and unneeded standards from W3C should have taught us this.
While some misinformed people might make this argument, I don't think you'll find anyone making it at Mozilla or other groups that actually participate in web standards development. We all know that the normal process is to implement first and then standardize. That's what Mozilla has done in the past with features like Geolocation and WebGL, and it's what we're doing today with new work like Audio Data, Game Pad, and Telephony. In fact, the W3C process requires two interoperable implementations before a specification can reach the Recommendation stage.
But there's a difference between a standard that is developed in the open, with the opportunity for all parties to provide feedback and influence development, and one that is developed and implemented in secret, and then deployed to production browsers and evangelized to content authors before anyone else has a chance to comment on it -- or even on whether the fundamental approach is a good idea. (And obviously these are two extreme ends of a spectrum, with a lot of gray area between them.)
The problem with many of Apple's "contributions" (and some of Google's) is that they never write specs for them or bring them to standards bodies. (This is the case for Aplle's -webkit-text-size-adjust.) In some cases they actively fight efforts to standardize them. (This is the case with Apple's touch events.) Or sometimes they do push specs to standards bodies, but only after a highly complex specification has been fully developed behind closed doors. (Google's Dart, NaCL, and Pepper have this problem to some extent.)
That's fine if what they really want is a proprietary ecosystem that works in their own browsers. But if they actually want these efforts to be part of the web, and if they want to be seen as stewards of an open web, then just implementing something is not enough. The web has lots of stakeholders, and the initial implementer needs to find a way to bring them to the table.
And how could NaCL have been done any better? It's been publicly published for years prior to the first shipping implementation. If Mozilla was interested, they could have put in requests for how they'd like to see NaCl and Pepper changed to better fit a Firefox implementation, or even a counter-proposal for running untrusted native code. But I've seen no such proposals, instead, just a blanket refusal to even consider it. I think there's a philosophical difference such that Mozilla isn't really interested in anything that isn't JS based, so suggesting that bringing NaCL to the working groups would have changed anything is somewhat disingenuous. It's kind of like hoping that Republicans would contribute to a National Single Payer healthcare plan design if it had been brought to the right committee.
It's a shame really, because proprietary native mobile platforms are hurting the web, and consumers don't really care, they just want fast apps which don't kill their battery or phone performance. Something like NaCL for mobile could preserve the DOM, CSS, browser security model, and other good things about the web, but replace JS with something much more performant for games, and this would go a long way to hedging risk against the proprietary native platforms. I'll take portal NaCl C-code calling into browser APIs and WebGL any day over Obj-C code calling into Cocoa that can only be installed through an app-store.
If the Web is to be around for decades more, the religion over programming languages needs to give way to polyglotism.
As on Dart, the language was released at version 0.1. The grammar isn't all that complex, the library is minimalist. It came with a early spec and source. It is not a "fully developed" specification. No one designs language grammars by committee. Languages are highly personal and opinionated. Usually one or two people design the overall structure of the language privately, and then release an initial spec, and it evolves from there.
When Mozilla developed Rust, the first time most of the web heard of it was Graydon dumping a gigantic codebomb into GitHub and it being covered on Lambda-the-Ultimate.
Which I think is perfectly find, but let's try and be a little level headed and fair, and not arrogantly think that what Mozilla does is uniquely better than what others are doing.
(I speak only for myself and I do not work on Dart, NaCl, nor Chrome)
Certainly, every vendor has been guilty here. I at least think that every extension Mozilla is currently encouraging use of is hoped to be a potential future standard. (And no, I'm not claiming this is unique -- some other vendors like Google are also good citizens in this regard.)
I also agree that proprietary platforms are hurting the web, and that the web needs new abilities in order to fight the threat. However, to preserve the openness of the web, new features need to be things that more than one vendor has the resources and motivation to implement; even if Mozilla and Opera thought Dart or Pepper were great ideas, adopting them would put is on a treadmill where Google (with its much greater resources) controls the speed.
And no, I am not claiming that Apple/Mozilla/Opera would have adopted Dart or NaCL if they were brought before the right committee at the right time. Part of getting early feedback means finding out if the community even thinks that your solution is something that's desired in the first place.
"When Mozilla developed Rust, the first time most of the web heard of it was Graydon dumping a gigantic codebomb into GitHub and it being covered on Lambda-the-Ultimate."
This is actually an interesting contrast between Mozilla and Google. The initial Rust code-dump was a barely-running proof-of-concept; it was shared with the world on the same day it was first shared within the Mozilla community. Zero lines of the current self-hosted compiler were written at the time. Most of the planned features (like the task system) were unimplemented. The first actual release (Rust 0.1 alpha) came a year and a half later, and that first release already reflected significant community feedback and contributions. For example, the packaging system in Rust 0.1 was written by a volunteer contributor who happens to be a Google employee. The stage of maturity at which Rust became open source was far earlier than Go.
Some things really are different at a non-profit like Mozilla, and the goal of opening everything up as early as possible is one thing that's unique among tech companies I've worked for or with. We don't always do it perfectly, and we do struggle with the need for people to do some types of design and experimentation without the world looking over their shoulders, but it's very much a unique core principle that affects all of our work.
Almost all of the additions to the browser API that Google has made are desired to make it into spec proposals. There is no desire for Chrome to be the only implementor of Dart or NaCL.
I'm a little concerned what you're saying here. That if an idea is good, it won't be adopted anyway, just because someone else has greater resources to implement it. It sounds like Not-invented-here syndrome to me. No matter what technical specs are proposed, Google is always going to have greater resources to develop them.
Everything you say about Mozilla, I can say about my experience at Google. The first release of Dart was very incomplete, it didn't implement a lot of the type system, no missing method, some stuff like default method parameters didn't exist. It generally really slow and bloated code. It was in a barely working state. The DartC compiler which was implemented in Java was not a production compiler design to be used by people, it was a prototype for research. This idea that Google sprang a fully-formed already finished product on everyone is a gross exaggeration. The Dart VM isn't even in Chromium yet.
The self-hosted compiler (Frog, written in Dart) has been developed completely in the open.
Google is a large company with hundreds and hundreds of projects, so not all of them operate the same way, but many of them are open sourced very early in the process, and Googlers push to release source early for client side web technologies. Google has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on acquisitions which it immediately turned around and open sourced, like WebM, and the first Google Web Toolkit, and Instantiation's products (donated to Eclipse Foundation)
Really, I think the comments on NaCl and Dart are patently unfair. They were released practically as early as they could have been, NaCL took, what, 2-3 years in the open of development before it was finally pushed to production.
Ultimately, if standards committees get gridlocked over political and emotional stuff, instead over the merits of technology, you will see people start to ignore them. A similar thing happened in with OpenGL ARB where vendors who had less resources voted down and blocked companies like NVidia and ATI who were progressing chips at a faster pace. Ultimately, it took DirectX surpassing OpenGL to push it to finally start evolving faster again.
I do think we agree on fundamentals though we may disagree on some cost-benefit analysis. All I meant about the "treadmill" is that some proposals have a much greater cost to implementers than others, and different organizations will weigh those costs differently. While some debaters may throw out "political or emotional" responses, I believe the decision-making process should be (and is, in the cases I've participated in) about allocation of resources, complexity of implementation, and the desired architecture of the web.
Technical issues and process issues are separate, but affect each other. When I say the process behind something like Touch Events was bad, I'm not giving that as a reason to reject the feature -- I think the feature should be accepted or rejected on its merits, like you said -- but it does mean that any technical objections that do appear will be much harder to resolve than they might have been. And as you say, Dart and NaCL have had better process behind them than Touch Events or various other extensions I could name. Dart and NaCL may succeed or they may fail (just as many of Mozilla's current experiments may suceed or fail), but at least their fates will be influenced by feedback from all stakeholders.
You are obviously better informed than I am about Dart and NaCL implementation. (Also, I accidentally conflated Go and Dart in my previous comment, which is embarrassing!) I apologize for any uninformed comments and defer to you on all the facts there.
I really don't want people to see this as a "Mozilla versus Google" thread. I hope everyone cares about standards issues because they help or hurt the web, not because they helps their favorite vendor or hurt a competing one. In the big picture, Google and Mozilla are close allies when it comes to web standards. As you say, the real risks to the open web are elsewhere.
NaCl was first announced in 2008, along with a research paper and and source code (http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2008/12/native-client-technol...). The next year Google sponsored the NativeClient Security Contest that awarded prizes to security researchers who could break out of the sandbox. A lot of the design surrounding PNaCl has happened in the open (see http://www.chromium.org/nativeclient/pnacl). I don't think it's accurate to say that NaCl was developed behind closed doors.
Also, other browser vendors seem to oppose NaCl in principle, and it seems unlikely that any other process Google could have taken to get buy-in would have resulted in other browsers accepting it.
I agree that there is a continuum of behavior here; in the NaCl case in particular though, it really seems like Google has done the right thing.
Deleted comment
Also:
> The big issue I have with Dart, which you
> seem to consider inconsequential, is whether
> Google forks the web developer community,
> not just its own paid developers, with Dart,
> and thereby fragments web content.
>
> "A Dart to JS compiler will never be "decent"
> compared to having the Dart VM in the browser.
> Yet I guarantee you that Apple and Microsoft
> (and Opera and Mozilla, but the first two are
> enough) will never embed the Dart VM.
>
> "So "Works best in Chrome" and even "Works only
> in Chrome" are new norms promulgated intentionally
> by Google. We see more of this fragmentation
> every day. As a user of Chrome and Firefox (and
> Safari), I find it painful to experience, never
> mind the political bad taste.
>
> Ok, counter-arguments. What's wrong with playing
> hardball to advance the web, you say? As my blog
> tries to explain, the standards process requires
> good social relations and philosophical balance
> among the participating competitors."
Basically he's arguing that the browser vendors of today (not developers/users) are the gatekeepers of what new technologies can be tried. It's like making browser innovation a UN Security Council where every member has a veto over doing anything. If you value progress and innovation, I do not see how you can support such a position.
If Google introduces something like Dart or NaCl, is willing to support standardization of it and even release a free implementation, but other browser vendors don't want to integrate it because they don't like it, that's their problem, not Google's. If that means popular apps become "Works best in Chrome," that is a self-inflicted wound.
A few hours ago at JQuery UK someone asked Paul Irish what he thought of Dart. Then the whole room laughed. PI mentioned 'its complicated' and then that 'Dart has a place' and then everyone laughed again.
So a knee jerk unintelligent response by some random group of Javascript programmers, given without context, is supposed to mean something?
The knee jerk reaction I was referring to was the "the whole room" of js guys that "laughed".
But I cannot understand either the point or why. If you could chip in with some context, I'd be grateful.
Anyone's free to try things. But those things will never become a part of the web platform if other vendors don't think they will benefit from implementing them. The people who make the browsers are gatekeepers of what ends up in the browsers. That's not a statement about how things should or shouldn't be; it's just a tautology.
The job of anyone who wants to create a web standard is to accept that fact, not ignore it. Ignoring it leads to single-browser "standards", which may get adopted by developers but will not become part of the open, interoperable web platform.
And, what are the things Webkit has built that were "overridden" by the standards process? Where did Webkit actually get things wrong?
Just what comes to your mind.
Today, experimental and prefixed features used in the wild are creating real problems for interoperability and competition. But I don't think there's a villain here, and I'm not blaming WebKit. Both the browser vendors and the W3C are using processes that were designed to certain solve problems. Now those processes are creating new problems and might need to change in response.
But, to answer your direct question (although I think this is getting on a tangent from the original post):
> "What are the things Webkit has "proposed" by releasing builds that you don't think should be part of the web platform?"
Dart is an example of something that Google has proposed (not "WebKit" as a group) that I and many others - even others like Oliver Hunt within the WebKit community - do not think benefits the web platform. Some people would put Web SQL Database in this category; I don't have an informed opinion about that one. (Though I do know it's the reasons some versions of Gmail wouldn't even load in mobile Firefox.)
> "Where did Webkit actually get things wrong?"
Apple's "meta viewport" tag is something that they released in Safari and evangelized to developers without specifying it or getting community feedback. I had the pleasure of reverse-engineering it for Gecko. Among other things, it's not even implemented in a layer where it makes sense. (It should be part of style, not markup.) Apple never proposed it as a standard; other people eventually did and are trying to fix some of the problems. Unfortunately, the basic design is locked in by legacy content (and has been since soon after Apple shipped this feature in the first release of mobile Safari).
But frankly, I don't care so much whether they get things "right" or "wrong." As bad as meta-viewport is, at least Firefox and Opera and Android and IE can implement support for it without controversy, and be compatible with sites that use it. The way that prefixed CSS properties are (a) released to market by browser vendors, (b) evangelized to web developers, and (c) deployed on production web sites is creating a situation where new browsers are either locked out of existing sites or have to implement each others' prefixes. This is not a stable equilibrium.
One thing I didn't have going into this thread that I have now is appreciation for how different this problem is in the mobile space than on the "desktop" web. It's easier to be frustrated with web standards in the desktop world, where Webkit seems like an unalloyed force for good. I can see how much trickier it is for your team given the fact that Gecko has been relegated to second class status by the market.
A number of people seem to have a somewhat extremely optimistic view that they're going to make Javascript competitive in performance and memory use compared to native on mobile platforms. There's just no evidence that it's going to happen anytime soon. It's just not even close, despite how magical emscripten or Mandreel might seem.
With more and more browsing activity shifting to mobile, and with the majority apps being entertainment/multimedia/games, holding steadfast to the idea that there are not benefits to alternate VMs is more of a dangerous than transient breakage of pages.
Yes, the prefixes are a problem, but the Web needs to evolve fast to keep up. A period of incompatibility and fragmentation can be tolerated. It's happened before, chaos and disequilibrium followed by periods relative calm.
I'm more worried about stagnation, and a future where the web gives way more to the client-server internet days, with everyone running OS specific native apps that read and store data behind walled-garden non-HTTP clouds.
Note that in a world where the Web was defined as "whatever WebKit renders", which lots of HN readers seem to be in favor of these days, we would of course be stuck with the old gradient syntax forever.
I completely disagree.
First, if a technology is really bad for the web, are you saying other browsers should still implement it, just to not suffer the situation where popular apps work best in Chrome? That's bad enough as it is, but those popular apps are likely going to be Google properties - google.com, gmail. That means Google can basically force other browsers to adopt technologies as it sees fit, even if they are bad for the web.
Second, the WebKit situation on mobile exactly shows why this is wrong. If one popular browser adds special features and leaves them there indefinitely, in release versions of the browser - as WebKit does with its special CSS properties, and like Chrome does with NaCl and perhaps soon Dart - then people will develop for those features. If that browser then becomes dominant, those features will become a de-facto standard. Given Chrome's incredibly rapid rise, we should not assume it will not become dominant on the desktop, so this should concern us all.
--BUT--
With ActiveX, there was no other way to accomplish the same task. With Dart versus JavaScript, I can't accomplish anything in Dart that I can't in JavaScript. And, even if I decided to use Dart for some reason, it would be idiotic of me not to provide a JS version for non-Chrome browsers.
What would be really nice (heck, even something a standards body should have done) is coming up with a standard byte-code for browsers, so I can use any language I want. JavaScript isn't good enough, because I want my sites to load faster, and parsing the code shouldn't have to happen every time somebody visits a page.
I used to think that too, until I read convincing arguments against it like this: http://www.2ality.com/2012/01/bytecode-myth.html
For example, late-binding, boxing/heap-numbers, etc all serve to make it extremely difficult to maximize startup performance, or heap overhead. It also makes the VMs much more complex to deal with optimizing such languages. TypedArrays don't really fix the problem, they just introduce others. For example, by forcing your to implement your own manual memory management everywhere. This is somewhat problematic if you're compiling a language with GC into TypedArray heavy code, since there's no finalizers in JS or Reference queues, you can't really do automatic release if a regular heap object holds into pseudo-objects in manually allocated memory.
The problem is particularly acute on mobile devices which are very resource constrained.
Also "Works best in Chrome" is hardly a self-inflicted wound. With the might of Google, that's actually a recipe for browser monopoly. This is the reason why Google pushed ahead with Dart despite the opposition.
And if you have no problem with that, then why is there a problem with a Dart VM in Chrome? All it means is that potentially, Chrome apps will startup faster or run a little faster.
However, this is not really much difference than V8 vs other JS VMs. There was a time when V8 was way way faster than other JS VMs, so the same speed differential existed anyway.
There's a difference between "doesn't run" and "runs, but faster"
But this is beside the point: Eich never asked if web developers want it or not.
If a technology has only implementation, even an open source implementation, that implementation will have all sorts of hidden assumptions and biases. No one will know about or understand those assumptions and biases until the time comes to use that technology in a new context.
In my work, I've dealt with multiple implementations of things like simulators, models and even languages. The additional implementations usually had some specific reason behind them (performance, alternative features, supporting different execution environments, different mathematical properties and so on). Nevertheless, the value of each alternative implementation (in terms of surfacing hidden assumptions, finding bugs, illuminating more general and flexible alternatives, etc.) went well beyond the specific reason that implementation was made.
These considerations are even more important in the case of software that is part of a large, chaotic, heterogeneous system like the Web. Imagine where the mobile web would be today if there hadn't been a W3C and, at the turn of the century, the Web really had been "what Internet Explorer renders" with no attempt to document and codify anything else.
Or, to take your example of Objective C, how much does Objective C matter outside of Apple's ecosystem?
Contrast this with:
- How much does JavaScript matter outside of Netscape's ecosystem?
- How much does Java matters outside of Sun's?
- Or, to take the granddaddy of examples, how much does C matter off of the PDP-11 and outside of Bell Labs?
None of those languages would be anywhere near where they are today without standards. On the other side of the coin, there is a reason languages like Python, Ruby and Haskell have had (and, each to a varying extent, continue to have) a "bus problem". Standards matter and even just the standardization process itself matters. I wish more people understood that.
It doesn't need to. Apple has demonstrated the agility of a wholly owned, vertical stack. The pace of change has qualitatively changed since the days of language standards set by plodding standards bodies.
But that also means that, no matter what its true potential is, Objective C will never be more than what Apple makes of it. It won't be seriously used outside of application areas Apple is interested in. It won't develop new features Apple doesn't care about. And if Apple decides to go in a different direction and/or runs into serious trouble, well that's it.
Apple has changed the world, but, unlike some other, standardized languages including the ones above, Objective C never will. If we lose the full potential of future great languages because they are limited by a single company and/or a single implementation, we will all be poorer because of that.
As you might guess from my username, I'm a fan of more than a few languages where (at least I believe) the differences go well beyond syntax. That means I want standards because I want to know what I can (or could) take with me to another platform and what I can't.
There are ongoing efforts to standardize a quite sizable subset of Ruby in Japan for later ratifications in ISO. Ruby is also de facto standardized by the test-suite RubySpec.
It is not ridiculous at all, in fact reference documents such as RubySpec have been one of the main reason for which you can move from a Ruby implementation to another without many issues and without having many compatibility hacks included in each compiler/interpreter.
Really? It doesn't sound all that ridiculous if you know cpython is the reference implementation of the language python, which is extended by the PEP process.
It has those too. And IIRC the w3c requires a browser to implement a reference version before something is standardized there.
There are also plenty that it purposefully implements incorrectly (CSS Selectors, for example). That's a lot less fine.
Are those the same guys who brought FTP upon us? BGP? 32-bit IP addresses?
There were few moments where it would be better if somebody said, wait a minute, we need to think first, then code.
32 bit addresses were a good idea. It's easy to look back on it now and say "they should have used 128 bit integers", but until recently, 32 bit addresses were the largest addresses that worked as scalars in all mainstream platforms.
Those are effectively entrenched de facto standards, but its not the fault of the creators, its the fault of the people unwilling to move with the times. I'm not cool enough to run an AS, but I know for the other two better alternatives are already here. As Vint Cerf has said, 32 bits was enough for an experiment, it just never ended.
IPv6 and SFTP are here and _in use_ by anyone who isn't clinging on to old tech like people clung to IE6.
>we need to think first, then code
Thinking first, implementing and then improving is how technology advances. Iteration is mandatory, otherwise you're stuck in a waterfall-type scenario. Without it, I sure hope you enjoy riding your horse down to the local Gutenburg press to pick up this week's HackerNews and read my comment there.
It's the network effect. Once something is "out there", it's really, really hard to get rid of it. If the first version that reaches critical mass has unfixable flaws, you'll be stuck with them forever.
I don't blame Vint, he couldn't have idea how successful the experiment is going to be, but I can't read HN over IPv6.
But now we know how web standards spread and stick around forever.
HTML5 special-cases parsing of <XMP> element. CSS has quirks mode, almost standards mode and standards mode and two syntaxes for clip().
There's a valid rationale to not using vendor-prefixes, because it could potentially add confusion and erode standards.
From my understanding, in effort to display web-pages at their best, some browser manufacturers are starting to honour the browser prefixes used by other vendors. I can see how this could create problems.
Which, if you're cynical, is how the W3C probably wants it.
I think your aggressive anti-W3C stance is really misguided. They're not the bad guys.
If you actually read the article referenced in the dcurt.is article, you'd see how vendor extensions are actually becoming something more than just ugly. Which is the whole point of the suggestion.
What I don't get is how this makes that browser a "monopoly". The only thing Webkit won was the string "-webkit" in the CSS property. It's the monopoly that gives the monopoly to Webkit. Not CSS vendor prefixes. Webkit has a virtual monopoly among mobile browsers.
Now, you could argue that that's in Apple's interest, and you could argue that "it's their browser and they can do what they want with it". But you can't dispute the fact that they're not helping web standardization in the mobile space. Which is a problem for anyone who wants a more standardized web.
No. This ensured that they didn't pollute the global namespace with experimental, partially-implemented ideas. If Mozilla, Opera, and Webkit each make e.g. "rounded-rect" declaration, and one browser takes the width as the first argument while another takes the radius first, then we're screwed. At least having "-moz-rounded-rect" and "-o-rouded-rect" means developers know how their pages will behave in each browser. I agree that the W3C is unacceptably slow, but that doesn't mean prefixes are a terrible idea.
You could, for example, just use one line of css for border-radius for all browsers. If one vendor does it differently you use their vendor specific namespace to override it. Surely that makes more sense than having to do a line of css for every vendor?
However for the initial implementation what's wrong with survival of the fittest? The most popular way will win through, which would most likely become standard. For those browsers that don't implement it in the same way you use their vendor specific namespace instead.
Yes it's likely to be hairy when it's first being put to use if browsers have slightly different implementations but no more so than using an experimental tag in the first place.
The difference appears to me to be that for the next five+ years I could be writing 8 lines of basically the same css for every instance of linear-gradient (and that's assuming we don't get any new browser vendors in the coming years) vs writing 2-4 lines with backwards compatibility or shock maybe even 1 line if I didn't care about older browsers (e.g. http://www.colorzilla.com/gradient-editor/).
I've participated in standards in both POSIX working groups (network file systems, network apis), IEEE working groups (PCI express Advanced Switching), IETF working groups (RPC and XDR, heck I'm the 'owner' of port 111!), various CAD standards groups, and a whole bunch of things that never even rose to a level of relevance to get published.
If standards bodies are effective, they take away power from companies to distort the playing field, if they are ineffective they allow folks to distort independently. So large companies send representatives to standards bodies to distort them in favor of their own company (Rambus is the canonical example) and other companies send representatives to make them ineffective so that they won't level the current field (Microsoft and XML is the canonical exemplar there).
The bottom line is that Standards bodies whine that nobody lets them do their job, and they tolerate members who actively prevent them from making progress. I have long since given up feeling any sympathy for them whatsoever.
Because a hegemony is so much better right? What fun that was last time around.
I don't think that we'll be better off just by making the current process "go faster," though.
There needs to be some proper vetting of features. You'd want to avoid the tyranny of the monied interests. It can't just be Apple/Microsoft/Google making the decisions about what goes in and what doesn't -- even though they're going to shoulder the cost on the user-agent side to implement the feature.
It might just be as simple as leaving the current ecosystem as it is, looking at the adoption rate and success of a given construct, and folding those into the "living" spec (without the prefix, of course) -- and just do this process on a regular, fairly frequent interval, like every 6 months.
Everyone understands that advanced features of CSS can't be relied upon—this is now part of the collective front-end developer consciousness.
Get rid of the W3C and let Mozilla and the Webkit project define the web moving forward; they've done a great job so far.
The standardization of required codecs for the `<video>` element is indeed a wonderful accomplishment by the non-W3C HTML5 WHATWG.
Seriously, a third-party neutral organization will always be needed. Who will you appeal to when the main companies start having different ideas about something? Another thing that organizations like W3C or IETF do is to provide some kind of shelter from patents and similar problems.
We can discuss about the efficacy of such shelters and about the ability to mediate between different options, but the web is definitely under a better situation than wireless telephony, a field where company-run consortiums decide standards and "settle" disputes.
No one. If the browsers refuse to agree on something (codecs being a good example), there's nothing that anyone can do about it. Just say "no standard is possible in this area" and move on.
OTOH, if two or more major browsers agree on the syntax and semantics of a feature, let's issue it as a standard (and de-prefix it) ASAP.
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The current group working on the contemporary HTML living standard just describes reality, by and large, so there was never really any doubt that "embed" would be part of the standard when we started back in 2004.
I fail to see how "monied interests" can affect much unless developers who are very much not part of these interests actually use these features. I think the way things are going (i.e., engines add features, developers use them or don't, the ones that get used get approved by de facto adoption, etc.) is perfect and fits the best with the pace at which things are moving in this industry.
I don't think, as many do, that it will lead to the proliferation of a bunch of confusing, bloated features being shoved into the spec (as loose as that word can be applied here). We haven't seen much of that yet, and I really don't think we will.
Here, we have an open source rendering engine that clearly delineates browser-specific features (each of which is well-documented). The use of a prefix makes it possible to use the browser-specific features offered by WebKit without sacrificing compatibility with other browsers, something Microsoft actively resisted. For quite a while, it was very difficult, if not impossible, to make sites that looked and felt right both in IE and in other browsers.
Had Microsoft extended standards in a way that played nice with the rest of the community, maybe they would have had someone saying something like this in their defence. Instead, they used browser-specific features as a way of undermining standards.
The biggest issue with being frozen on IE6 was not so much the standards but all the terrible bugs.
And if you want to get technical about it, in theory you could support ActiveX on any platform. The problem was the controls were all Win32 software. There probably would have been some marginal benefit for Netscape to support it on Windows.
Prefixed WebKit features are certainly not consistently well-documented. CSS animations, transforms, etc. had to be carefully reverse engineered by other browsers.
I get the distinct sense that a lot of people don’t really care about web standards so much as they care about their favourite company controlling standards. If it were Microsoft who was forging ahead with new features, would the MacBook-wielding, Gmail-using technorati be so enthusiastic?
I’m not even entirely against the new -webkit- stuff, I just hate the hypocrisy from people who claim to be all for web standards, except for when there’s a shiny new feature that only works in Safari, Chrome, and iOS. Microsoft has arguably been doing the best job of respecting web standards since IE9, and they get very little credit for it.
I just hate the hypocrisy from people who claim to be all for web standards, except for when there’s a shiny new feature that only works in Safari, Chrome, and iOS.
I'm right there with you. For a while I've been coming to realize that the standards never actually mattered for these folks, its just that "IE6 doesn't conform to standards" made a more convincing argument for firefox than the real reason which was "IE6 is a pain in the ass and I hate it."
Now the people who want the new hotness are realizing that the standards they tied themselves to have become an albatross. If they actually ever gave a shit about standards, they would have been pitching ideas about how to update the standardization process to work with today's implementation realities. They actually would have been doing it along the way, and we would have never ended up where we are now.
It’s the people who argue for a decentralized, open-source alternative to Facebook, but embrace Google+. It’s the people who explain how terrible it is to tie your business to a single vendor, but decide to build businesses on iOS. It’s the people who tell you they would never put any personal documents on the cloud, but embrace Dropbox. It’s the people who claim to support open, DRM-free data formats and think the Khan Academy is the future of education, but think iBooks textbooks are great.
Like I said, I don’t have a particularly strong attachment to open source and open data formats — I just hate the way people use openness and standards as a prop. Saying standards aren’t necessary when WebKit has neat new features is (loosely) analogous to only supporting democracy when the party you vote for wins.
That implementation can be discussed, modified or accepted and become a standard non-prefix property. It's happened a few times where the WebKit implementation has had to be reversed to match another vendor's approach. This is good.
It has gotten us closer to using CSS3 in a shorter period of time than we have with any W3C standard.
The way that both Microsoft and Netscape did it in the 1990s was not only the wrong way to do it, it was a malicious approach aimed at segmenting the web.
And Microsoft's biggest sin was that they froze IE at version 6 for over 5 years, ensuring that their mishmash of standards and proprietary implementations would weigh on the Internet.
Yes, the W3C process takes about half the lifespan of many HN readers. Yup, it's not ideal.
But it's the only game in town and it's been going on so long because it works. Because it successfully brought Microsoft into the fold and conversation at a time where, had they decided, they could have broken everything.
It's worth exercising a little perspective. Can you think of any endeavor that has so successfully united vendors to create something as broad and interoperable as the web, over such a relatively small period of history? The W3C has been fundamental to this.
- What has the W3C ever done for us?
-- Well, HTML.
- Oh yeah, they gave us that. Yeah. That's true.
-- And CSS you could view source and copy.
--- Yeah, you remember how scared we all were of Microsoft Blackbird?
- All right, I'll grant you that HTML and CSS are two things the W3C have done...
(you get the idea.)
So what has the W3C actually done for us? XHTML?
And html is arguably a bad document language. Look at all the different conflicting ways in which it is rendered. And don't even get me started on css....
The problem is not the webkit vendor attributes, the problem is that proper standards aren't able to keep up.
HTML5 is still not a proper W3C standard (or "recommendation"), it's still just a working draft, and was last updated in May of 2011. It's been six years. So far.
CSS border-radius is still not a W3C recommendation. It's been a draft for nine and a half years. So far. It was last updated one year ago.
With a standardization process that broken, vendors need to take things into their own hands, and them doing so, especially webkit doing so, has been an astounding success, IMHO.
http://whatwg.org/html
I'm not entirely certain about this approach though, so what is the real harm in a web where boxes have slightly rounded corners in one browser and not another? I'm also curious if anybody has examples of WebKit-only sites (that don't actually function in other browsers) that don't fall under the heading of "look at this cool new CSS thing that this site exists to demonstrate."
Google Maps in WebKit: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/maps-webkit.png
Google Maps in Firefox: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/maps-firefox.png
Gmail in WebKit: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/gmail-webkit.png
Gmail in Firefox spoofing a WebKit UA header: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/gmail-firefox-webkit-ua.png
Gmail in Opera or Firefox normally: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/gmail-opera.png
Twitter in WebKit: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/twitter-webkit.png
Twitter in Firefox: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/twitter-firefox.png
These are just some of the big-name sites that I knew off-hand. At least these high-budget sites usually have some sort of fallback. Some sites just have degraded styles; some have parts that are unreadable. Some provide partial functionality to non-WebKit browsers; others won't work at all (like Bing web search in Opera).
This is becoming more common on the desktop too, with sites like Tweetdeck that just lock out non-WebKit browsers using UA sniffing: https://web.tweetdeck.com/web/unsupported.html
For some technical details, see for example http://bugzil.la/668218
Mozilla does need to "step up" -- but work required to fix cases like these is not technical. It's about gaining user marketshare, developer mindshare, and improving the standards process.
> I hope it does kill the W3C and CSS Working Group standardization process.
To this, I have to ask "Mr Curtis - are you _CRAZY_?"(!)
Do you not realise that it's taken over 12 years to say good bye to IE6. Have you not had the pleasure of battling with the ramifications of a browser that doesn't play by the rules?
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There are some understandable reasons for not making use of vendor prefixes.
The article that Dustin Curtis links to makes some valid points about the dangers of continuing to use vendor prefixes. A similar line of thinking is presented here [1]
The alternative to using vendor tags isn't to stop using the features - it's to simply drop the vendor prefixes and use the property names from the (non-ratified) CSS specifications before they're fully approved.
For all it's failings, the W3C does a grand job. Negotiations take time. Best we don't throw our toys out of the pram.
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[1] http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2010/03/css_vendor_p....
W3C standards are not, in fact, an innovation speed limit. Vendors are free to implement whatever they'd like.
The only way a vendor should be encumbered by the W3C is that if they choose to implement a feature, they should also support the W3C incarnation of that feature. That's it, full stop.
The problem with IE6 isn't that it did extra things. It's that it did a variety of things (some extra, some not) badly, and then Microsoft refused to bring it into compliance. That's not a problem we have with Webkit. So what are you saying when you try to tar Webkit with the IE brush? How familiar are you with the development process behind Webkit?
I'm not tarring webkit with an IE brush. I'm stating that without the W3C or similar body to set standards, we would in a far worse situation.
The article spectacularly misses the point.
[1] http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2010/03/css_vendor_p...
[2] http://www.glazman.org/weblog/dotclear/index.php?post/2012/0...
The author acknowledged that his suggested solution was wrong. See the redux [1] (which is actually mentioned in the article) for alternative solutions.
My main concern is that the dcurt.is article misses the point entirely.
[1] http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2010/03/css_vendor_p...
They are making themselves increasingly irrelevant because they exist primarily to restrict and limit rather than to expand and innovate.
Partly that's the nature of the beast, standards are after all rules.
The problem is that the rules need a clear and timely mechanism to evolve. Clearly the W3C is the wrong answer to that problem.
I remember well what things were like in the days of horrible tag soup trying to support internet explorer and netscape, and that sucked too.
Standards are good, having a single rule set for everyone to test against is good.
The W3C though, yeah they suck hard.
Way past time to move to a usage-based standards adoption mechanism. Let people innovate, if that change sees wide support adopt it as a standard.
What Prefixgate shows is that a W3C standard is not a rigid set of laws like the 10 commandments. Rather a W3C standard is like a peace treaty - all adherents agree to respect certain protocols and behave in certain ways, buy are free to pass whatever laws they want within their own boundaries. Assuming that these proprietary laws do not conflict with existing treaty stipulations.
Peace treaties give us access to the best of both worlds: vendors are free to innovate as they see fit, yet they still commit themselves to some level of interoperability. Innovations influence the standard and the standard ensures that all vendors adopt the best innovations at some point.
The comparisons between IE of old and Webkit are incorrect. Microsoft has a history of implementing standards incorrectly (http://www.quirksmode.org/css/quirksmode.html) and bullying standards bodies (http://techrights.org/2011/09/06/michel-levy-comes-out-swing...). When it comes to standards Microsoft does not act in good faith.
I don't see why it can't be. For example, going back 10 years the W3C could have said we're standardising a series of layout definition attributes (or multiple backgrounds, or colour fades, or bordering styles, or animation modes or whatever) and then waited for those to be implemented by the browsers. I don't see why the standards bodies can't anticipate a need that hasn't yet been coded for and implement a preliminary standard definition for browser writers to use.
It probably wouldn't work in practice because it appears to rely on the standards body moving faster than the browser makers which is a laughable suggestion as things stand now.
As I, probably shortsightedly, see things now it's the javascript (jquery, mootools, etc.) writers who're best placed to speak to the next iteration of web standards as they are actively filling the holes that are missing in the current iteration of HTML+CSS (and associate tech).
So 10 years ago, before the iPhone and the iPad and the entire mobile web? You really expect that standards body 10 years ago would have anticipated the need for multi-touch events, for example?
W3C do appear to create some standards before there is a working implementation too.
Well, people who have worked with standards bodies know why it can't be. Because of the natures of the processes involved there and the interests that have to be balanced.
The fact that something is at all possible (= no laws in the universe prevent it from being so) don't mean it has a high enough probability. Yeah, a committee could work faster and flexibly. Experience has shown us that historically, they never do.
Perhaps a prefix like "this-feature-will-be-deprecated-in-2013-".
Slightly off-topic, but in a similar manner, when we struggled with users permanently deleting records, ignoring the warning that they were permanently deleting records, and calling us to retrieve the irretrievable, we changed the confirmation box from "click OK" to "type the word 'irreversible". This cut the calls to near zero.
IMO there's no "despite" about that, "Due to" would be more appropriate.
Design by committee sucks even under the best of circumstances. When the committee is made up of very different companies each trying to use the web as a chip to bolster different parts of their businesses, of course the process is going to be broken. It probably can't not be broken.
That aside, you picked a ridiculously low-hanging fruit of a concern. Consider something larger, like JavaScript and the fate of ECMAScript 4 due to the very situation I'm talking about. But even the minor bikeshedding concerns can be used as political levers one way or another regardless of how (in)significant one implementation is compared to another.
coming from what appears to be a webkit dev, that's pretty bad.
standardization bodies should certainly be deeply fixed - but this kind of reply is wrong.
This is a bit too far. The -webkit prefix was a gesture of courtesy. What if other browsers implement it differently, and the spec changes? then older webkit browsers will render it incorrectly.
The solution is simple: code to the standards, then target the fringe browsers. It doesn't matter if it's webkit or IE, this is a future proof, cross compatible solution that will solve both problems.
It turns out that IPv4 and DNS worked pretty well, though of course the internet at-large only uses a portion of those "standards". We didn't need an organization to tell us every last little detail and how it would work and "approve" it before we use it. People found out what worked, documented it, and it became the de-facto standard. We've never waited on the various internet "governing" bodies while keeping our own progress at bay. THere's absolutely no reason to.
Know why everyone (more or less) obeys the allocations issued by ARIN? Because we recognize someone has to manage that limited resource pool, and they do an okay job of it. We're all free, more or less, to set up networks in whatever way we want, with whatever IP space we want - we just can't expect cooperation from our neighbours without some discussion and agreement so we don't stomp on each other's space - so we look to ARIN and their brethren to manage this. If they ceased to do so efficiently, they'd be replaced.
The W3C has no power to force a developer or vendor to implement a given feature or not, and nobody really cares whether or not something is "officially" compliant. Most web pages are not fully compliant... yet the web, built by kids and adults and everything in between grew up and here we are, talking on HN.
It'd be great if people could agree when we end up with overlapping features from different vendors...... it makes it hard for the developers right? That should be obvious to all. But we've switched browsers over the years, and will again, and whichever ones actually do what people need them to do, as well as keep developers happy, will prosper - w3c has little to do with it as far as I can see.
Same for DNS (gripes aside - let's be realistic).
We implemented IPv4 and it works great, but does the internet at large obey the type of service bits which are part of that standard? heck no. It's a big, evolving, organic thing.
The web - same deal. Know what makes a standard? Something people adopt and continue using. Usage defines the standards - nobody is compelled to do anything just because it's a "standard" according to some group.
http://www.webkit.org/coding/lgpl-license.html
WebKit is living, breathing, open standard that anybody can fork and contribute to.
Code talks, paper walks.
NevWebKit is an implementation, not a standard. That you
Complaining about people using -webkit-* before the standards exist is obviously unreasonable, considering the implications of populating the global namespace with conflicting versions of the same feature.
Apple flat-our refused to ever remove -webkit prefixes that they have once shipped.
Note that no one is complaining about the mere existence of the prefixes; the problem is:
1) The way they're being used by web developers. 2) The fact that some of these properties are not standards-track, with Apple actively refusing to allow them to be standardized.
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Dismiss the W3C and the purpose for standards at your peril. Webkit and its offshoots have the ability to innovate on the edge because that body and its impact kept the web open.
EDIT: It's worth noting, with sober consideration, that exactly the same argument was made to support Internet Explorer during the ugliest days of the web. This could have been cribbed verbatim from something a Microsoft advocate would have said in the late 90s.
I don't agree. I'd say the web saving itself from IE's grip had a lot more to do with Microsoft sitting on its ass and doing virtually nothing to push things forward once they got 90% share. If Firefox didn't have its impressive extension mechanism or webkit in the form of Chrome wasn't so damned fast or the whole mobile browser didn't become a thing, people would still largely be using IE, and none of those circumstances has a single thing to do with the W3C, really.
IMO, the fact that this is even being discussed but now in the context of Webkit instead of IE shows that the W3C isn't really that relevant when it comes to pushing the web along.
Plus, NaCl is closer than "something like" to ActiveX. What do you consider to be the salient difference between the two technologies?
Wine has been a long time in the making and certainly wasn't ready to be integrated into Mozilla for ActiveX compatibility on Mac OS, Linux, or even alternative browsers on Windows in 1996, so it's kind of a silly point to make.
http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/ppapi/
Why are you ranting about things you clearly know nothing about?
> The NPAPI port for other browsers was abandoned
You're bitching up and down this thread about standards, and now you're defending the ancient, non-standard Netscape plugin architecture? Do you have any clue what you're talking about, or are you just here to be anti-Google?
Webkit and Mozilla being open source means that no single company can control the projects or add a proprietary single-platform exception to them.
Now, a company could FORK Webkit/geecko and add something like ActiveX to it, but the fork wouldn't be part of webkit/geecko project anymore, and we'd still have webkit/geecko proper. For example, Google added NaCL which is something like ActiveX to Chrome, but not to Webkit itself.
Open source is one thing, but if you're not able to convince Google and Apple to ship your changes, you've hit a wall. FF implementing support for the WebKit extensions is what will break the web back into the IE-dominant era.
Having a competing browser is useless if it won't work with the content that people want to use.
Or, if were webkit not open source then it would probably not end up being a joint apple-google production. Joe-bob's ideas for CSS that he compiles into Firefox himself may not be relevant, but eventually if FF sucks enough some fork of it will displace it as it did for Mozilla (cf. V8 displacing JavascriptCore) per some version of Kuhnian paradigm-shift.
I hate Microsoft, but the argument you mention was made because it was mostly right. IE "won" because it provided a better platform and better user experience, not for any other reason.
The focus on IE in antitrust battles has been a disgraceful waste of resources. There are far better things to attack Microsoft for than providing a better browser than the piece of shit later versions of Netscape turned into.
If you look at timelines instead of listening to hysterical lawyers, the truth becomes clear. If you listen to the people who were actually at Netscape during this time, it becomes even clearer. They were utterly lost in the woods before Big Bad Microsoft ate them alive.
Make a powerful, but extremely simple (as in: small instruction set) virtual machine and protocol. That way anyone can make their own standards.
I second that the web is constantly evolving, whether or not it benefits the ego-fat cats at Google, Apple, or Mozilla. Get used to it and adapt, at least that's what I remember hearing in a Google Tech Talk back in 2008, does anyone still tune in to those?