Tag: standards

CSS working group is irrelevant

A great example of this is the difference in how the WHATWG got a blog and how the CSS working group set one up. In the WHATWG, the idea was floated for a while, and then one day someone volunteered to run it, and the blog was up and running within hours. Anyone (literally anyone) can post to the WHATWG blog (there’s a moderation step that we added to deal with the spammers, but all it takes now is to get onto IRC and ask for the post you wrote to be published). The CSS working group, on the other hand, has been discussing how to set up a blog, and what the first entry should say, and what tool to use, for over 2 months! Nearly every phone call (the group has weekly teleconferences) for the past 9 weeks has had the blog discussed at some point.

more dragging of feet. i suspect some member companies have an interest in making CSS not too powerful.

Adobe Apollo

Springtime means conference time, which means it’s silly season on the web again. Adobe introduced Apollo, their latest attempt to recreate the web in their own image. Apollo is based on Adobe’s own markup language, Adobe’s own runtime, Adobe’s own graphics and animation framework, Adobe’s own video and audio codecs, and Adobe’s own developer tools. You can do many things with it, but “you may not sublicense or distribute the Software. … You may not modify, adapt, translate or create derivative works based upon the Software. You may not reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise attempt to discover the source code of the Software. … You may not install or use the Software on any non-PC device or with any embedded or device version of any operating system.” It requires at least Windows XP SP 2 or Mac OS X 10.4.

nice smackdown on all the adobe / ms nonsense this week. and i am actually working on a side project with mark now 🙂

Future of the Web

While XHTML2 is a semantic improvement over XHTML 1.0, it does not seem likely that it will matter for web developers for a long time, especially when one considers that Internet Explorer still doesn’t offer XHTML 1.0 support. It will take many years for a new version that might support XHTML2—and we have been given no indication that the next one will. On the other hand, many parts of HTML5 are already creeping into browsers, and, if Microsoft takes an active part in the development of HTML5 in the future, it looks likely that many features that are already very polished will be supported cross-browser in a much shorter timeframe. The fact that HTML5 contains several areas that are already ready for implementation while still being developed in other areas makes it a technology that is easy to partially adapt until browser support is fully evolved for the features you wish to use.

good explanation of xhtml5 vs xhtml2 , etc

GeoRSS conformance

Now, lets take a look at a recent, relevant, and very concrete example: Google Maps support for GeoRSS. In order to deal with feeds produced by “average, relatively low-skill programmers” Google must deal with non well formed feeds, multiple incompatible formats (+ Atom, optionally including the declining but not quite gone Atom 0.3 variant), multiple ways to express GeoRSS data, and even deal with applications which don’t follow these specs either.

sam keeps adding tests to georss, nice!