molly.com
Saturday 11 August 2007
Dear W3C, Dear WaSP
Having been given the odd task of coming up with Technical Plenary material for the W3C, it strikes me not simply a blow but a full knock-out when my colleagues either don’t respond or merely suggest that we let Tim Berners Lee talk about the Semantic Web yet again and let everything in the Web Standards world go on as if the work that you and I do daily didn’t exist.
Fuck that.
Pay attention, W3C and anyone who cares. We have serious problems. On the surface:
- HTML 5 serialization under W3C
- Run Time Environments such as AIR
- Personal agendas overriding agendas that serve the greater good
I call on my colleagues, my friends to talk about this. Oh goodness, and here’s a unique idea. Perhaps the Web Standards Project (WaSP) can stop playing to its own audience and address:
- The future of JavaScript and its standardization under ECMA considering the Adobe/Mozilla relationship, whatever that is, really
- The future of markup – for god’s sake why are we revisiting the lingua franca of the web? Doesn’t WaSP or other standards groups have a serious responsibility to hash this out?
- Moving education forward. There is nothing like teaching people how, because then they’ll go and do. That’s true innovation.
Are you all just dumbed down by the fact you’ve got a job or what? Tell me. Let’s fix it. W3C, WaSP, whatever. We have problems.
Let’s talk about them and figure something out.
Filed under: WaSP, accessibility, announcement, browsers, faith(less), innovation, javascript, policies, professional, society, software, standards, w3c, web design and development, whatwg
Posted by: Molly | 01:40 | Comments (90)
I would like to suggest that it is easy to confuse “drama” with “passion.” Drama is an exaggerated but FALSE expression. Passion might appear exaggerated, but there’s nothing false about it.
And there is nothing false about how I feel, and clearly, the mere expression of concern about these topics has caused a lot of unpleasantness here.
This is a rare experience for me, to see people – many of whom are long-time colleagues and friends met, others readers or occasional visitors, be so snicky toward each other on my site.
I am leaving this conversation up and encourage positive discussion to continue. I’m taking a deep breath now, and I hope any additional discussion will be productive.
[...] Then to read Molly’s recent post about the state of our industry and community, I became even more despondent, as I remembered how the microformats community and WHATWG are behaving like cabals in their self-interested refusal to acknowledge the accessibility issues with that they’re doing; and how so many of their leading lights are utterly refusing to accept this. By mid-morning I had my head in my hands, sighing, there’s absolutely no point to anything. [...]
Molly,
On #whatwg various people (including me) commented that they don’t understand your point. Could you please clarify what problem you see with HTML 5 and what would need to be done to address your concern? Right now, this post seems to add to the discord.
Berners-Lee:
I hope you are following this blog post and thinking about the morass that exists. I believe you are the only individual who has the ability to get these issues resolved.
It is a time to stand up and lead. There is not a business school in this world that would not be very receptive to meeting with you, offer advice, input, resources and solutions. I am sure the same applies to any investment bank.
Personally, in five years or less, I do not wish to be reading a postmortem on the opportunities missed and the failure of the W3C.
Looks like a nice day in Cambridge, today. Would be a good day for a short drive to Soldiers Field, Boston.
I don’t understand the rationale for HTML5.
I don’t see a need for it. I don’t what problems HTML5 addresses. I don’t understand why the W3C see’s XHTML and HTML as being two different animals. I don’t understand why the W3C is resurrecting a fundamentally broken language instead of pushing XHTML usage properly. I don’t understand the weird way of specifying HTML5 that allows for such preposterous debates as the inclusion of the alt attribute. It’s useful, it’s used, where’s the debate? Why is the onus on people to prove it’s used? Keep it and have done. Why isn’t the onus on the person trying to change the existing HTML4 specification to establish why an attribute is harmful? Why is old, old ground having to be fought over again, and again, and again? How does introducing another tag-soup language help the web? Why are the people that can’t be bothered to move to XHTML going to be bothered to move to HTML5?
Wouldn’t the W3C’s time be better spent pushing XHTML to the people that haven’t yet embraced it – rather than tarting-up an old and broken language for lazy developers to use in the same lazy and broken way?
Lets just let the browser makers go at it again….let them release new ‘features’ and tags they think folks will like. Then, in a year or two, we can figure out which ones are really useful and add them into the spec.
Obviously, the new way isn’t working.
Wow, someone finally taking a stand.
– slr
[...] Henri Sevonin asks the following lucid question amongst the chaotic discussion on this site recently: On #whatwg various people (including me) commented that they don’t understand your point. Could you please clarify what problem you see with HTML 5 and what would need to be done to address your concern? Right now, this post seems to add to the discord. [...]
Comments to this thread are now closed (although ping/trackbacks are still welcome) and you are encouraged to respond to the follow up discussion, Dear WHAT WG and HTML 5 WG. Thanks everyone!
[...] 13th, 2007 · No Comments After Molly H.’s Call To Action and follow up post (read them) on her blog, I startedwondering what the Web Standards Project (WaSP) actually does. I’m not saying this to be mean. I’m genuinely curious. [...]
[...] This post from Molly about HTML5 and the W3C, and the resulting comments, illustrate very well why the process of making or improving standards is so ugly, and why I don’t participate anymore. Discussions are dominated chiefly by people who have time to dominate discussions, which over time includes fewer and fewer of the people who actually should. This is not unique to technology, the same problems occur in politics, especially local. Open Source has the same problem and can usually survive it through things like rapid iteration, plugin systems, benevolent dictators, and easy forking. However I don’t know if those concepts could be successfully applied to a standards process, almost by definition. « Tumble-Hybrid Comment » [...]
[...] Keith Bowes, in a recent comment on Molly’s blog, says: Personally, I don’t see the point of HTML5. HTML 4 was a big improvement over HTML 3.2: better internationalization, better support for style sheets, more structure and less presentation, some of the more questionable things were removed or put in the dust bin of de facto obsolescence, etc. But I really don’t see where HTML5 is better enough. [...]
[...] In his keynote, Chris will examine the state of the web, some of the problems facing browsers (as Platform Architect of the Internet Explorer browser) and standards (as co-chair of the HTML Working Group) and explore what we need to do together to move the web forward. This is very very timely in the context of the current state of HTML, about which there is a great deal of debate and no little controversy in some quarters. It’s a privilege to be able to get the low down from someone so tremendously experienced and deeply involved in making the web what it is today, and in helping shape what it will become. [...]
[...] What exactly is the crisis in web standards? People assure me there is one. But they can’t be bothered to explain. [...]
[...] There’s people like Molly trying to move the gigantic W3C boat, but it’s not really happening. There’s the HTML5 mess, there’s CSS drafts taking years, and there’s people getting pissed off. [...]
[...] There’s people like Molly trying to move the gigantic W3C boat, but it’s not really happening. There’s the HTML5 mess, there’s CSS drafts taking years, and there’s people getting pissed off. [...]
[...] There seems to be a rumble amongst the big name advocates on this very subject. Partly brought about by the “Dear W3C, Dear WaSP” post by Molly. I saw this trickling through my feeds even before I reached Molly’s blog. Jeremy Keith’ s post was the first and others followed, while Patrick Lauke and Tantek Çelik slugged it out in the comments of Molly’s blog. [...]
[...] Jeffrey Zeldman answers Molly Holtzschlag. [...]
[...] Zeldman är cool och analyserar den synbarliga turbulens som frodats den senaste tiden på ett lysande sätt i inlägget “What crisis?” One day, people from nice homes may forsake XHTML for HTML 5, making us wonder what that XHTML pony ride was all about anyway. Or not. If HTML 5 bombs, we’re not so badly off with the markup specifications we have. Remember this. It may help you sleep at night. If HTML, CSS, or accessibility go seriously astray (and depending on who you ask, at least two of these are in trouble), we will still be able to use HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0, CSS1 and 2.1, ECMAScript, the DOM, and WCAG 1.0 (with our without reference to the samurai errata) when Britney has grandkids. [...]
[...] Molly and Molly and Molly, Zeldman, J. Keith, James Edwards all wrote about it. Now if Tantek and Henri Sivonen can join in with a blog post, this superstar meme would be complete. [...]
[...] I’ve been lost over the last few days trying to understand the differing opinions on the status of the next generation of HTML code. Molly, who I’ve had the good fortune to meet and whose opinion I respect, raised the alarm about the state of the W3C development. Jeffrey Zeldman whose article “To Hell With Bad Browsers” kicked off the movement for standards-based web development doesn’t see a crisis at all. [...]
Spätsommerliches Sammelsurium
Meine Schonzeit ist zu Ende. Leider! Es haben sich doch einige interessante Artikel und Tipps in meinem Feed-Reader gesammelt. Auch auf die Gefahr hin, dass ihr sie alle schon kennt, werfe ich hier einmal ein paar interessante Sachen zu den Themen CSS…
[...] While the debate may have been smoldering under the surface, the post that [more or less] caused the blaze to ignite was Dear W3c, Dear WaSP by Molly E. Holzschlag, in which she states: Pay attention, W3C and anyone who cares. We have serious problems. On the surface: [...]
[...] En pleno debate sobre si existe crisis o no sobre estándares web -los del futuro-, le toca el turno al arte y ciencia de CSS gracias a CSS Sculptor, un producto-extensión de Dreamweaver desarrollado por Eric Meyer que incorpora y automatiza las mejores prácticas del momento en la creación de layouts. [...]
[...] While the the W3C seem to be taking forever to implement new web standards and seem happy sitting on their butts forever without moving forward. Here are a bunch of CSS 3.0 proposals that Web Designers would go nuts over if ever they are implemented. I give them time till 2999 to implement them, at the rate things are going in the W3C. I saw the original post here on anieto2k blog but since I don’t understand what language it is written in, I decided to translate it. By the way Opera 9.5 has full support for CSS 3.0 [...]
[...] There has been a recent surge of commentaries on the W3C over the past few weeks. Jeffrey Zeldman, Jeff Croft and Molly have all weighed in on this and have sparked a flurry of commentary. Here’s a one sentence summary of each post: [...]
[...] In mid-August, things got, to say the least, a bit heated, and I think it all originated with Molly’s Dear W3C, Dear WaSP post. Later, it was followed by Roger Johansson’s re-entry into the W3C HTML Working Group. I must say that I sincerely admire and look up to Molly’s passion, and I’m glad that Roger, while more calm, decided to continue contributing. [...]
[...] 11 de agosto 2007 – Molly E. Holzschlag escribe a sus queridos W3C y WASP [...]
[...] There is some turbulence in the web standards group, and a lot of designers and developers I respect and admire are part of it. Molly Holzschlag’s call to fix problems with the future of markup and Javascript got a lot of the community members together. She has also followed up it with the explicit issues, addressing the working group. [...]
[...] Nos cuenta que cuando inventaron CSS no pensaron que fuera a durar tanto, sino que era una solución temporal para los problemas de la época y esperaban que por ahora tuviéramos algo mejor. La realidad es que el Consorcio ha tardado unos 5 años en pasar de CSS 1 a CSS 2; parece que la evolución a CSS 3 va a ser un poco más rápida, pero no puedo sino pensar en las críticas que ha recibido el Consorcio por parte de los que un día fueran defensores míticos del mismo, como Molly, o Zeldman y otros en menor medida, en cuanto al ritmo al que trabajan, el tiempo que tardan los borradores y -en definitiva- el infinito tiempo (sobre todo en Internet) que tardan las soluciones en llegar a los navegadores y finalmente al público. Tampoco hay que olvidar que no todo lo que se desea es posible en la época… ¿Quién no ha deseado tener sombras como un estilo CSS? Pero, ¿desde cuando puede el ordenador medio computar eso en tiempo real? Paralelamente, admiten que no saben a qué dar prioridad en CSS 3, y que se lo tenemos que decir nosotros, la comunidad de desarrolladoras. La impresión que me queda finalmente es que la implantación de standards de facto es mucho rápida que la que ofrecen desde el W3C. Es una lástima, porque los desarrolladores necesitamos algo no proprietario a lo que agarrarnos, y me parece que el Consorcio no es capaz de satisfacer esta demanda en un tiempo razonable. [...]
[...] The W3C aren’t the be all and end all though. They have their own set of problems. Anyone can publish their own ideas about how best to move the internet forward (For example, MS’s old version of the CSS box model was much better than the W3C’s!). That’s the idea behind an open internet. [...]