[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Offtopic: Web Standards Project
On Sat, 8 Aug 1998, Tim Bray wrote: > At 12:02 PM 8/8/98 -0500, W. Eliot Kimber wrote: > >So I'm wondering what the true motivation of the WSP is: publicity > >generator? counter to the W3C? public action group ala Nader's Raiders? The > >Green Peace of the Web? (Confidential to Eliot: we start sinking French spy ships Monday at noon) > Well, IMHO, the W3C has done its job in getting some potentially useful > standards published. The W3C has not been effective as an advocacy or > bully-pulpit organization, and it's hard to see that happening, in part > because of some of the reasons raised by Eliot. Several of the founding members of the WSP are also members of the W3C working groups, or are otherwise involved with HWG, AIP, or non-browser software folks, like NetObjects, Allaire, and so forth. One thing that came up repeatedly was that the W3C couldn't risk [expletive deleted] off the major vendors, and so those W3C members have stayed out of some fairly volatile discussions as a result. The W3C is in a delicate position when it comes to *enforcement* or *punishment* for non-observance or non-implementation of standards. They can't exactly say "You can't play, Microsoft, because you're putting Rob Glaser through such hell and IE4/Mac treats DIVs as inline elements." It just wouldn't work that way. > It seems quite possible that the people who organized the WSP, mostly > big-time site builders who spend other people's money to build highly > visible Web presences, are well-positioned to get some attention and do > some useful advocacy. Which is why it interests me. I think this is a key point - I spend other people's money, though I generally do more on the backend than the front end, and I /know/ that most of my clients don't know enough about standards and incompatibility to really care. They do understand that if they want bells and whistles it costs more, but many of them don't seem to understand that the core work is done in a couple of days and then we spend weeks tweaking things to make sure they're cross-browser compatible and/or degrade well. (One of our clients, Oxford University Press, needs its site to work in lynx, for example, including the order forms.) So I think that one of the duties of the WSP is to raise awareness - not among the designers and developers - we already know how broken everything is, and how risky it is to use anything beyond HTML1.0 for fear that the client's customers or users will come back with complaints and it could blow our credibility. Rather, we need to raise awareness among the folks who are writing the checks, and let them know *why* it costs so much more to deliver the cutting-edge stuff and somehow make it degrade well, or to deliver standards-compliant stuff that doesn't work anywhere due to lack of support for [insert browser-related standard here] or due to the need for ugly klugy workarounds. We've got a long road ahead of us, though, and I think we're aware of that. I mean, %$#!@, most of the suits I've worked for didn't know what 8-bit ASCII was, much less the difference between HTML4.0/CSS-P and HTML3.2... > One interesting > discussion is, which standards to focus on... my personal bet would > be XML/CSS/DOM, because the implementations are just happening. Is > it worthwhile, at this point in history, trying to retroactively > save HTML? Real question. -Tim HTML is dead - it's not even cute and fuzzy. As far as I know, the big goal right now is to try and get Netscape to ship the new layout engine in 5.0, so we can count on full CSS support and some XML, with a solid DOM. The timing issues are a problem, as we're not exactly there yet with a complete DOM spec. That, more than anything else, worries me and makes me wonder if the WSP has a snowball's chance. My main goal is to reduce the cost of maintenance of the sites I build. Period. I have no hope that the browser vendors will come to Jesus and magically support everything the W3C recommends (even if it's their own recommendation). I'd be happy if I could count on the things that make it easier to maintain a large-scale site, such as external CSS and Javascript files, being implemented according to spec. It would be nice to have a cross-platform-compatible DOM Javascript API, but that's easy enough to work around for the stuff they both support, anyway. There's been a lot of talk, here and on the WSP list, about how any org promoting standards compliance should stick to the standards. I'd just like to jump in here and say "that's horseshit". If the standards were implemented correctly, you could. Otherwise, we'd be stuck with a gray background bullet list. And frankly, that's not going to impress the target audience. Please be a bit more realistic. Besides, the WSP has not taken an official position /against/ innovation, rather, thay are trying to get the stuff that's already standardized *implemented*. I don't care if IE supports IFRAME and NS supports LAYER. I care that neither of them supports CSS the way I'd like. It makes my life more difficult, my sites more costly to maintain, and my customers spend more which reflects poorly on my company. Any flames that start with "I ran your sites through the HTML validator at the W3C, and ..." will be redirected to /dev/null. Thanks, Steve -- http://a.jaundicedeye.com <-- rants and writings http://hesketh.com/schampeo/ <-- projects and info http://dhtml.hesketh.com <-- coming soon xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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