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 t

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.