[WEB4LIB] An interesting article

[Kevin Bishop]

-----Original Message-----
Subject: [WEB4LIB] An interesting article

I assume my department head got this in the Scout Report:

Smoke, Mirrors and Silence: The Browser Wars Reignite
The browser wars we saw before weren't the "wars to end all wars," and 
this author believes that the current, new browser wars are just the 
surface of a larger, World Wide War to control the future of the Web 
itself.
Read more
http://www.informit.com/articles/printerfriendly.asp?p=174156

I would love to hear others' reactions to this -- I'm still mulling it 
over myself...

---------------------------

We discussed this article on another list earlier this week.  (Not
surprisingly, it ignited an anti/pro-Microsoft debate.)  

The author of the article, Nigel McFarlane, also authored a book titled
_Rapid Application Development with Mozilla_.  He clearly has an
approach to (collaborative, open source and standards-based) to the Web
that informs the article.  

The article, in sum, claims that Microsoft hates the web, champions web
standards in the interest of building interoperable web applications and
pleads for organizations to truly understand the need for standardized
web data.

I personally do not know many details about MS's plans so I cannot
verify or refute his claims that they're threatening to create "a
corporate Diaspora and a tollway" of the Web.  He makes a good case but
we may have more than Microsoft to be concerned about.  

Simon Willison elaborates: 
http://www.sitepoint.com/blog-post-view.php?id=174066

Last week, the W3C held their "Workshop on Web Applications and Compound
Documents", a workshop focused on making the Web a "platform-independent
application environment".  One of the papers, submitted by Opera and the
Mozilla Foundation, addressed the "rising threat of single-vendor
solutions addressing this problem before jointly-developed
specifications".

The workshop was not what you might call a smashing success.  Because
the W3C membership includes many server-side and plugin technology
vendors (incl. MS), the W3C works harder at new innovations, new
standards, rather than improving and extending those that already exist.
To do so would acknowledge a) that we're stuck with IE6 for a few years
at least, and b) that single-solution vendors will eventually release
software whose functionality exceeds that of software based on
jointly-developed specifications, effectively snuffing non-proprietary
web environments.  

Developers from Mozilla, Safari and Opera, among others, walked away
from that workshop and formed a splinter group out of frustration: the
Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHAT WG).  The
charter in a few words: WHAT WG "aims to develop specifications based on
HTML and related technologies to ease the deployment of interoperable
Web Applications, with the intention of submitting the results to a
standards organisation".

It looks like they intend to put these efforts on the fast track.  

I may be naïve, but I think this is going to be a very interesting year
for web standards.


-kb


___________________________
Kevin W. Bishop > bishopk at rpi.edu
Communication & Collaboration Technologies
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute > http://www.rpi.edu/
  RPInfo: http://www.rpi.edu/rpinfo/