A Baby So Ugly, Even A Mother Couldn’t Love It: Web Standards. AKA: Just Keep Swimming

Filed under School, Web Design by Chad | 7 comments

I may be one of the most conflicted web designers on the planet. Seriously. I write Flash/Flex code about as often as I work in HTML/CSS. I love ‘em both. I hate ‘em both. Each tool has their own pluses and minuses. I speak often about my love for Flash here, so let’s change gears for a second. Let’s get provocative even… It’s got to be said. What the fuck is the deal with these standards writers, working groups and developers these days?

Why do I ask this… Well, you all have Flash/Silverlight on the ropes, but you are giving them a free pass. How so? With the release of HTML 5’s video tag, canvas, yummy semantic tags and other advanced markup goodies… pretty much any major site, (eg, Facebook, YouTube, Google Video, Vimeo, etc), could just about up and walk away from Flash with the next major revision of Internet Explorer (hopefully 9 will come around). You see, Safari 4, Firefox 3.5 are out and they like to party. They’re out playing video all night long and swinging from the rafters. The biggest draw on the web today, video, is by and large delivered via Flash. Now, I wouldn’t be so brash as to say that Flash’s days are numbered by any stretch by this developing situation. There are a lot of things that Flash can do that simply can’t be replicated, even with JQuery (my fave JS framework), Processing.js or the new Scripty 2. However, these new browsers really take care of a ton of things that Flash is needed for right now like video playback and basic RIA implementations.

I don’t mean to be disrespectful to the standards group, W3C, etc, but with the competing standard, arguably, an anti-standard, Flash, on the ropes, why are you not focusing and assisting the devs in the trenches, the browser and tool developers and the web designers in the cube farms at MS, Adobe, etc? It seems as though there is a fracturing, rather than a coalescing of resources and forces in the standards arena. Don’t believe me? Check this out. And this. And then for a laugh, this. It’s a bit liek the wild west again. I’m getting flashbacks to 1999-2000, when tables and spacer.gifs were clutched in the dying grips of every SimpleText coder and every GifBuilder jockey.

Sound audacious? I know, right. But look at the evidence. Twitter is abuzz with the recent additions to HTML5, with new hot samples being posted in playgrounds daily, what it means for Flash devs and on and on (simply run a search there and see). Beyond that, a number of high profile standards focused designers are on the warpath right now, speaking out and writing with a virulence not seen since the height of the browser wars (yes, I’m that old). For example, Zeldman has had a series of fantastic posts lately laying it out on the line talking about the demise of the XHTML standards group, defending the use of standards in the face of adversity and Eric Meyer has recently started giving a talk on “how Javascript will save us all”, in which he recommends using Javscript (favoring no specific framework, really) to do things that CSS3 and HTML5 do quite well. There are a number of other examples out there just like this. ‚Äì Full disclosure, I use both Meyer’s and Zeldman’s books in my classes.

Talk about cutting off your nose and all of that rot. I love standards just as much as anyone, but when the big boys are changing their tunes about what constitutes good standards implementation (separate content – HTML from presentation – CSS and behavior – JS) in order to remain within the toolset and bowing down to the same boards they fought against a decade ago to get CSS2 adopted, I start to get a bit squeamish. You see, I have to teach this stuff to students. Teaching standards based design was before a lot like teaching a foreign language. A language a bit like Japanese in that it had rules that are reasonable cut and dry and work well with each other because agreement on how they work was decided upon and then used! Now, it’s like a mish-mash of bad drunken Engrish. Too many exceptions, IMHO. It’s like “i before e”, but with end tags and doctypes. *Blech*

Am I abandoning web standards? Nope. Though, I’ll probably be a little more likely to make an exception to the rule in what constitutes a good use case for it vs a plug-in, though. After all, we have until 2022, right? Thoughts? What are you doing to keep your standards based design skills sharp? My advice, just keep swimming.

Posted on July 7, 2009

7 comments

1. Darren Jul 7

   Not to mention the issues of codecs in the HTML5 video tag. Google and Apple are backing H.264 while Mozilla can’t afford to (and don’t want to) pay the licensing fees for a closed, patented codec and are backing Theora. Sure, it’s trivial in HTML5 to offer video encoded in both codecs but what content provider will want to encode all their content twice when Flash is already everywhere and plays H.264?

   Also, I think it’s worth remembering that standards don’t come from some pure reality untouched by mortal greed and corruption but are really the result of a political process where inclusion is based on which company pushes their non-standard technology the hardest. I’m not a fan of MS by any means but would XMLHttpRequest have come about if they were primarily focussing on following standards?

   My life has been so much easier since I became a full-time Flex dev and left wrangling with browser inconsistencies behind.

2. Chad Jul 8

   Darren,
   Thanks so much for reminding me. In the writing of this, I seem to have forgotten the mess about the codecs. That was one of the things that spurred me into writing this post in the first place… This article on ZDNet details Ian Hickson’s views: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-318208.html

   Here is the political infighting laden message you alluded to: http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-June/020620.html

   UGH. What a mess.

3. Ian Hickson Jul 9

   We actually _are_ focusing and assisting the devs in the trenches, the browser and tool developers and the web designers in the cube farms at MS, Adobe, etc. (Well, not MS and Adobe specifically, they refuse to actually participate. But others, e.g. Google.)

   If there are features you think are missing, though, or there are other issues with the spec, please do let us know! You can e-mail me directly (ian@hixie.ch) or join one of the lists and take part in the discussions. See the top of the HTML5 spec for links to the various resources you can use to get us your input:

   http://whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/

4. Chad Jul 9

   Ian,
   Thanks for dropping by and commenting.

   The HTML5 spec’s lack of coherency towards video codecs, ECMA’s recent debacle regarding typing of variables, etc, the slowness of of adoption of CSS3 also cast a big shadow on standards IMHO.

   I think a major effort akin to Wasp, Dreamweaver task force etc is in order. Some recent conversations between IE’s PM (http://adrianba.net/) and various users shed some light on that… The big boys just don’t want to play ball.

   I realize that the independent spec writers like yourself are doing what you can, but without Webkit, Chrome, IE, Mozilla, etc adopting and able to faithfully supporting those specs, they are meaningless.

   For example, an undependable video tag is worse than not having one at all… we’ll go back to the day of selecting your video format of choice on every site.

   Thoughts on that?

5. Ian Hickson Jul 9

   For HTML5 I work with all the browser vendors (though Microsoft aren’t as forthcoming as the others) ‚Äî in fact, the video brouhaha was one of the few cases where that broke down, because we haven’t been able to find something that all the players can agree to. That it’s been the only example of this in the whole of HTML5’s development speaks to how much the browser vendors are cooperating, I think.

   I completely agree that without the browsers agreeing to them, the specs are meaningless.

   I dunno about CSS and ECMAScript, I haven’t been as involved with them in recent years. Different groups have different approaches, though. The whole standards world isn’t of one mind, not by a long shot.

6. Chad Jul 9

   Thanks again, Ian. I guess I’d just like the ability to drop Flash for a lot of these simple video playback use cases, right now it’s about the only game in town for dependable video delivery.

1. Joeflash’s Enigmacopaedia » HTML5: Yet Another (yawn) Flash Killer

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