The responses (and lack thereof) to the essay I published a few weeks ago and the events
at the recent W3C
Workshop have led me to believe that the W3C is no longer the
primary organization to which we should look for future standardization on the
Web. The W3C is foremost a consortium—a collection of member
companies. It does what its members want it to do. Its members, today,
are mostly interested in standards used in closed, controlled,
environments (where interoperability doesn't matter) such as:
- communications between machines that operate what
is, to the Web, a single server
- content provided by cell phone providers to their customers
- content provided on “intranets,” where content authors can assume
users have a particular browser and a particular set of plugins
The W3C solution for the latter two of these areas is
SVG and XForms, occasionally mixing in SMIL and XHTML.
SVG and XForms weren't even designed for the Web. SVG was designed
by graphic designers who wish the fact that Web
pages aren't printed on paper would go away and by mobile
phone businesses who want vector graphics for sending non-Web content to
their mobile phones. Never mind that it ignores one of the key
architectural principles of the Web. The main arguments for XForms
always seem to relate to “intranet” forms (where companies can earn
money), not Web forms (where they can't earn nearly as much, since they
can't charge for clients).
The W3C community apparently decided years ago
that HTML (as
distinguished from XHTML) was not the future of the Web. That would
have been fine if the W3C had made the transition from traditional HTML
to the new standards easier:
- The use of compound documents could have
been the killer app for switching to XHTML, but the SVG spec defines
stand-alone SVG incompatibly with CSS's processing model and syntax and
doesn't describe how SVG works when combined with the formats that
existed before it.
- A mechanism for transitioning to XML within the
text/html MIME type could
have allowed authors to start using XHTML on the Web while some browsers
still didn't support it.
- Better definitions of how namespace-aware
tools interact with old-style HTML could have allowed the same scripts
and stylesheets to work with both old HTML and compound documents
containing XHTML, which could have made it easier for authors to start
writing compound documents without having to switch their whole site to
XHTML (which is often too high a cost). Such definitions would have
required sacrificing a tiny bit of theoretical purity, but that's too
high a cost for today's W3C.
So the W3C may have decided years ago to
replace the Web with XHTML, but they've clearly failed to do so, and I
don't see any signs of that changing.
Postscript: Why the Workshop made me mad at the W3C
Attending the Workshop on Web
Applications and Compound Documents, especially its conclusion, made
me quite pessimistic about the future relevance
of the W3C. The theme that seemed to be repeated over and over
during the workshop was that Web browsers are no longer relevant and
that the Web as it is today is no longer relevant. The workshop ended
with a bunch of “straw poll” questions asked by Dean Jackson. These
seemed to lead towards the predetermined conclusion that SVG, perhaps
with the help of XForms and XHTML, will save the Web by replacing it. Note in
particular the following segment of the draft
minutes:
Steve Zilles: A third question: If
there is to be a profile, who thinks it should be done in the
W3C?
Dean Jackson: 19 Elsewhere? 0.
TV Raman: Attach a timeline.
Dean Jackson: ASAP? 21? Ad not ASAP?
0?
The question of whether there should be a profile at all was
never asked. (Can you guess why I didn't vote on where or when it
should be done?) And note that there were about
46 people in the room. After the straw poll questions were put to
a vote the workshop was hastily ended a half an hour early, without
nearly enough chance for discussion of the polls just taken (especially
by the more than half of the room who didn't vote at all).
