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My biggest horror with all this new W3C tech, is that in reality: it's really old. Because of Microsoft's stupid mistakes while reigning power over the browser

My biggest horror with all this new W3C tech, is that in reality: it's really old. Because of Microsoft's stupid mistakes while reigning power over the browser world, we've been in this 10 year period of stagnation in which we've go nowhere. There's no real laws you can put against Microsoft, but if this were a real world situation, we'd be trying them for crimes against humanity. They have effectively ceased innovation for an incredible amount of time, and I would go ahead and say that they've slowed down the exceedingly fast development of the last decade. CSS3, Javascript 2, HTML 5, XHTML 2, etc. should've came out years ago. Possibly in different forms, but nonetheless this monopolization over a browser market has killed _everything_. I am glad that Google is getting into this game. Not only because it will definitely give Microsoft a run for its money, but we will finally have new innovation that before seemed to take years to implement.

DLWormwood 18y ago
> I would go ahead and say that they've slowed down the exceedingly fast development of the last decade. As a fellow developer, I'm about a commit a heresy down to text: "Most people don't want fast development." People may claim they want change or for things to be "done with" in a timely matter, but the reality is that change brings disruption in economic, social, and political terms. Take a look at IP4, for example. IP6 just isn't getting traction because the problems it solves have now become "features" to many people. (NAT being one of the big ones, since it's gotten the perception of being a security feature.) My job involves working with IE 6, since my organization refuses to update our systems to even use IE 7, much less standards-compliant stuff like Chrome or Firefox. Simply put, if MS was sent to trial for "crimes against humanity," the jury of "peers" who would to be selected would acquit them. Why? Because the court would likely consider "peers" to be end users, business men or the ignorant, not developers or technologists like us.
- potatolicious 18y ago
  The removal of NAT, IMHO, is a major ache in the market. What used to be purely an annoyance to developers and technologists has now become a serious stumbling block for users. The internet is no longer the download-from-website model that it was years ago. There is a massive amount of user participation now, which is why upload caps are increasing as services like video chat, peer-to-peer gaming, etc take off. And now you tell them only one person can initiate a video chat from behind a single router. The user is annoyed. Or you tell them that you can't both be playing the same game at once on two computers due to a port conflict. IMHO there's a real need to get NAT out of our system, and there's a very real consumer benefit to doing so. It directly opens doors to services and products that people are already clamoring for.
  - DLWormwood 18y ago
    Just for the record, I'm not a believer in NAT, but I have worked for people who do, hence my using it as an example of a "feature."
- mechanical_fish 18y ago
  I'm going to resist following you down the NAT rathole and focus back on Web standards. Where I might be inclined to agree with you. People expect innovation to happen in "Internet Time" -- but that is a myth, born of hype and bubble thinking. In the real world, it takes on the order of decades for people to even grasp the full potential of the existing HTML/CSS/JS standards and de facto standards. [1] I just don't think innovation in computing is being particularly held back by these technologies. [2] They're not the bottleneck. Consider some popular Web 2.0 sites: Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, even Google. If you were transported back in time to 1996, you might find it difficult to replicate some aspects of these services (for example, your hardware and software bills might cause you to lose consciousness -- do you have any idea what 1GB of RAM used to cost?!) but the primitive state of the HTML standard would not hold you back. Your site would be butt-ugly (no CSS yet!) and/or employ dozens of horrifying <table> hacks, and you'd be stuck doing lots of full-page loads (no JS yet!) but it would work just fine. Why weren't all these things built back in the 90s? The reasons are different in each case (Wikipedia and Facebook required a critical mass of web users; Flickr awaited the development and growth of the digital camera market -- the Apple Quicktake, one of the first digicams, was released in 1994; Google arguably did exist back then but it was called "Yahoo" or "Altavista"; Twitter just hadn't been thought up yet!) but none of them had anything to do with poor web standards. You might argue that Ajax apps like Google Maps or Gmail are being held back by web standards sluggishness, and that's a stronger argument. I do think we'd see more innovative apps if we further lowered the barrier to delivering cross-platform, cross-browser apps over the web -- that's been the lesson so far. But it's not as if the situation is hopeless: you can build pretty good Ajax apps now, you can resort to Flash, or you can leverage the power of web-based education, development, marketing and delivery to ship (brace yourself) old-school desktop apps better than ever before. Nor is it the case that the standards bodies are the bottleneck here: The problem is insufficient market penetration of Webkit and/or Firefox. In other words, I'm not sure that inventing more and newer standards would be more helpful than trying to get more use out of the standards we already have. ---- [1] Witness how long it has taken for blogs, online news, and Craigslist to start actually killing newspapers, an event that has been predicted for a very long time. [2] Of course, that's easy for me to say -- I'm not a designer or a typographer. Typographers are tearing out what remains of their hair for the lack of a better CSS standard for specifying typefaces.

DLWormwood 18y ago

> I would go ahead and say that they've slowed down the exceedingly fast development of the last decade. As a fellow developer, I'm about a commit a heresy down to text: "Most people don't want fast development." People may claim they want change or for things to be "done with" in a timely matter, but the reality is that change brings disruption in economic, social, and political terms. Take a look at IP4, for example. IP6 just isn't getting traction because the problems it solves have now become "features" to many people. (NAT being one of the big ones, since it's gotten the perception of being a security feature.) My job involves working with IE 6, since my organization refuses to update our systems to even use IE 7, much less standards-compliant stuff like Chrome or Firefox. Simply put, if MS was sent to trial for "crimes against humanity," the jury of "peers" who would to be selected would acquit them. Why? Because the court would likely consider "peers" to be end users, business men or the ignorant, not developers or technologists like us.

potatolicious 18y ago
The removal of NAT, IMHO, is a major ache in the market. What used to be purely an annoyance to developers and technologists has now become a serious stumbling block for users. The internet is no longer the download-from-website model that it was years ago. There is a massive amount of user participation now, which is why upload caps are increasing as services like video chat, peer-to-peer gaming, etc take off. And now you tell them only one person can initiate a video chat from behind a single router. The user is annoyed. Or you tell them that you can't both be playing the same game at once on two computers due to a port conflict. IMHO there's a real need to get NAT out of our system, and there's a very real consumer benefit to doing so. It directly opens doors to services and products that people are already clamoring for.
- DLWormwood 18y ago
  Just for the record, I'm not a believer in NAT, but I have worked for people who do, hence my using it as an example of a "feature."
mechanical_fish 18y ago
I'm going to resist following you down the NAT rathole and focus back on Web standards. Where I might be inclined to agree with you. People expect innovation to happen in "Internet Time" -- but that is a myth, born of hype and bubble thinking. In the real world, it takes on the order of decades for people to even grasp the full potential of the existing HTML/CSS/JS standards and de facto standards. [1] I just don't think innovation in computing is being particularly held back by these technologies. [2] They're not the bottleneck. Consider some popular Web 2.0 sites: Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, even Google. If you were transported back in time to 1996, you might find it difficult to replicate some aspects of these services (for example, your hardware and software bills might cause you to lose consciousness -- do you have any idea what 1GB of RAM used to cost?!) but the primitive state of the HTML standard would not hold you back. Your site would be butt-ugly (no CSS yet!) and/or employ dozens of horrifying <table> hacks, and you'd be stuck doing lots of full-page loads (no JS yet!) but it would work just fine. Why weren't all these things built back in the 90s? The reasons are different in each case (Wikipedia and Facebook required a critical mass of web users; Flickr awaited the development and growth of the digital camera market -- the Apple Quicktake, one of the first digicams, was released in 1994; Google arguably did exist back then but it was called "Yahoo" or "Altavista"; Twitter just hadn't been thought up yet!) but none of them had anything to do with poor web standards. You might argue that Ajax apps like Google Maps or Gmail are being held back by web standards sluggishness, and that's a stronger argument. I do think we'd see more innovative apps if we further lowered the barrier to delivering cross-platform, cross-browser apps over the web -- that's been the lesson so far. But it's not as if the situation is hopeless: you can build pretty good Ajax apps now, you can resort to Flash, or you can leverage the power of web-based education, development, marketing and delivery to ship (brace yourself) old-school desktop apps better than ever before. Nor is it the case that the standards bodies are the bottleneck here: The problem is insufficient market penetration of Webkit and/or Firefox. In other words, I'm not sure that inventing more and newer standards would be more helpful than trying to get more use out of the standards we already have. ---- [1] Witness how long it has taken for blogs, online news, and Craigslist to start actually killing newspapers, an event that has been predicted for a very long time. [2] Of course, that's easy for me to say -- I'm not a designer or a typographer. Typographers are tearing out what remains of their hair for the lack of a better CSS standard for specifying typefaces.