The future of web standards, by James Bennett.
Simmering discontent with the pace, or lack of pace, at which the W3C develops standards, or recommendations, for web based technologies has been boiling over into rage in some quarters recently.
The world of standards-based web design and development has been undergoing something of a shake-up these past few days; Andy Clarke’s CSS Unworking Group seems to have opened the floodgates to expressions of dissatisfaction with the current method of progress (or lack thereof) in developing and standardizing new features for web developers and designers. Alex Russell’s The W3C Cannot Save Us and my friend and former colleague Jeff Croft’s Do we need a return to the browser wars? continue the theme, as does Stuart Langridge’s Reigniting the browser wars, which popped up as I was finishing the first draft of this post.
I was around during the “first” of the browser wars and I can tell you we DO NOT need to revisit a time like that again. This website is optimised for Internet Explorer. No, never again. Please.
It’s not just the W3C that is causing “problems” however, and the “runaway” roll out of technologies, or techniques, such as AJAX is also a factor.
The combination of these two problems leads to a very real worry: that whatever chance there might have been for a truly interoperable Web will disappear, with useful content and applications disappearing into the proprietary walled gardens which provide the only genuine opportunity for new features and capabilities.
W3C standards development used to tick over at a reasonable pace up until the release of XHTML 1, but now very little seems to go beyond the “candidate recommendation” stage…
Hi John,
Creating technical specifications take time, a lot of time. The difference between producing a specification 10 years ago and now is that the constraints have been increased. For example, the Candidate Recommendation is a phase we are seeking *interoperable* implementations. 10 years, this implementation phase didn’t exist at all.
These requirements have been created because users, developers, designers were voicing their disappointment with features which were not deployed in an interoperable way. So the W3C listened and added these requirements.
About specifications going beyond Candidate Recommendation Stage… Let’s see the facts.
4 Specifications are in PR right now, and will become Recommendations in one month or two usually.
21 Recommendations have been published in 2007.
Hi Karl, thanks for your comment. Great to have a visitor from the W3C here :)
I’ve been using standards since early 1998, and used to baffle people back in the day when I told them I coded to W3C standards, as hardly anyone had heard of them :)
I’m not having a go at the W3C, I imagine standards can take years to develop, but there is certainly some frustration out there at the moment, and talk of rampant proprietary technology development and a return to the browser wars is just more than a little alarming.
great post
Thank you Joel.
we are listening :) even if it’s not always visible.