Everyone wants their thing to be HTML | Hacker News Reader

Everyone wants their thing to be HTML

blog.mozilla.com

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In the real world, most true progressions in web technology has been some variation of the following:

* One browser vendor implements something

* Some other browser vendor realises its a good idea, copies it

* Every other vendor scrambles to implement some form of it

* Behaviour is formalised into a standard

* Browsers slowly but surely end up on the standardised version

This often tends to create saner and more useful 'standards' than the real ones: InnerHTML, the Quirks Mode box model, Ajax, Canvas, font-face, JavaScript. The downside is slow and 'incorrect' implementations can be slow to fix bugs (although that happens with true standards too). Standards are rarely truly "industry leading" and I'm truly not sure if the standards leading is actually much better in the real world than the present ad hoc development method.

That's a standard free-market, laissez-faire take on things, but not entirely accurate. The usual IT factors of lock-in, path dependency and network effects have their place. As does the frequently underestimated, yet monumental task of getting effective interoperation even when all parties are willing and able to do so (neither of which is generally the case).

Minor browser engines such as Webkit, Gecko and Opera can't change the market much on their own. They need to be interoperable to some degree for people to start using their additions to the standards on the wider web. HTML5 (nee WHAT-WG) was initially those browser vendors coming together to work on exactly that.

You give Canvas as an implementation before standardization example, yet it was far more iterative than that with Apple's original implementation (for use in the walled garden of their widgets) being presented for standardization with the explicit idea that it was good for Apple if there were interoperable implementations out there.

It's a pretty good example of Co-opetition. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coopetition)

"a video element that isn’t interoperable"

The img tag isn't hugely interoperable, but it'd be a sad web without images. <audio> is a huge step up from the current madness of <object> <bgsound> <embed> or <flash>.

Are people out there really using XHTML still? It'd be interesting to do a poll to see how many are using XHTML vs HTML.

I'd also be interested to see what this crowd uses.

I'm currently taking a web design course, and we're supposed to be using XHTML. Strict. We lose points if we don't have all our pages validate as XHTML Strict. :) So yes, some people are still using XHTML, and thinking it's better.

My experience/understanding has been that XHTML bears little relation to the real world though - iframe is an invalid XHTML element?

I think the issue here that he is referring to (obliquely) is the disagreement on video codecs.

So to take your img example it would be analogous to a specification for img where Firefox was supporting PNG (but not GIF) and Safari supporting GIF (but not PNG) and IE supporting neither but Microsoft is at the same time pushing a closed source browser plugin that can show images in a Microsoft proprietary and patented format that sits outside of HTML. That would be a "sad web" too, even if it technically had images.

He's not (imho) against the video tag in any way, just pointing it out as an example of the (inherently) political squabbling and consequent craziness that surround standardization in a multi-billion pound market.

Sure, it's a pain, but I think it has to happen, and just like images, where jpg/gif/png emerged victorious, some video formats will emerge that are supported everywhere. Maybe just wishful thinking...

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