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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Browser innovation efforts -- where's W3C in this p icture
 Maybe we should take a hard look at populism itself and its implications for leaders who choose to lead by that means. Perhaps XHTML simply isn't popular. Let me reask the question I asked yesterday: if we put 'leadership' aside for the moment, what governs the choice of technologies and implementations? Is it the dominant content type or the running code? Are these separable? When looking at The Web or Blogs, or any populist manifestation, we see the power law effect noted by so many pundits. Power laws are feedback driven. This does not mean a single signal source typically, but multiple signal sources that are roughly reinforcing each other. To overcome their aggregate power, one would have to find a shared component that is disruptive and immediate. I posit: o XHTML has not been successful because the reasons for switching to it are not persuasive to those who have the means to make the switch, so no matter how loud any given signal, it can be ignored. In the worldview of HTML, XML is background noise. o IE remains dominant because the brand within which it is hosted is more popular than any of the alternatives. There is no incentive for a mass switching behavior and the work of the virtual terrorists has not been persuasive. In the world of business, they are background noise. Why did XML become popular in the face of that? Size matters. The scale of the power law distribution of HTML users is quite large but the scale of HTML browser developers was infinitesimal. The community that had the means to make the switch was quite small and easily lead at the time when the decision was made. The problem was that HTML itself was a monoculture and that increasing the available number of application languages without unduly increasing the complexity of the HTML browser was a real goal and easily met. SGML with a bit of cleanup and no real invention needed was recognizable and easy to accomplish. By grandfathering HTML at every opportunity, the browser developers and the W3C gave up its one opportunity to change the ecosystem systemically. Instead, it caved in to the populist sentiment. Is that a failure of leadership? Yes. The problem of the W3C is that it succeeded wildly but witlessly and now cannot undo that success despite any acquired wisdom because it does not have the means and those that do do not have the incentive. It is a classic Nash equilibrium. So far, there is no compelling reason to change the rules. In other words, the browser wars are still a skirmish and background noise in the overall spectrum of concerns. len From: Michael Champion [mailto:mc@x...] On Jul 8, 2004, at 10:00 AM, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote: > it may be time to "send in > the clowns". To be fair, the W3C started out as a Clown Collective that swept up after the mess that the various browsers were creating and attempted to herd the elephants in the same direction. At some point they apparently decided that this task was too dirty and smelly and left it to WS-I, WHAT, et al., and aspired to the position of ringmaster (or whoever it is that traditionally leads the circus parade). In other words, the responses to my original query make it clear to me that the W3C has stopped doing what it used to do that made it an invaluable forum during the browser wars. Now that the browser wars are starting to be less of a one-sided slaughter, the W3C has "other priorities" (as Dick Cheney would say). To be even more fair, a lot of this is because the "elephants" won't follow the W3C's lead, e.g. with XHTML, SVG, XForms, etc. It's at least open to debate whether the role of a leader is to keep pressing on and figure that the herd will catch up when they realize that the direction was right after all, or whether the leader should go back to simply trying to keep the elephants bunched up and moving in more or less the same direction. 
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