4 ms·

I love the little historical overview in the post. With more than 25 years of hindsight, the push against user-centred standards is so obvious. W3C is always be

by isodev 1y ago

I love the little historical overview in the post. With more than 25 years of hindsight, the push against user-centred standards is so obvious. W3C is always better than whatever coolaid-du-jour big corps wants you to drink because (at the very least), someone actually thinks "how is this going to affect people using it" as opposed to Google/Apple's approach "How is this going to affect our revenue".

api 1y ago
Nobody pays for anything with user centric standards. If software were free to produce and services were free to run this would work, but it doesn’t. Software in particular is incredibly time consuming and expensive, especially if you want to make it usable.
- wobfan 1y ago
  > Nobody pays for anything with user centric standards. ??? Why do you think this?
  - api 1y ago
    Do people buy chat apps? Web browsers? Web servers? Web content? Clients or servers for other open standards? No, which means you’ll never see them get the level of polish or investment that closed stuff gets. Because when it’s closed you can make people pay or monetize it with advertising. I’m not cheering for this. Don’t shoot the messenger. I’m pointing out why things are this way. A major problem is that while free software efforts can build working software, it often takes orders of magnitude more work to make software mere mortals can use. That kind of UI/UX polish is also the work programmers hate doing, so you have to pay them to do it. Therefore closed stuff always wins on UI/UX. That means it always takes the network effect. UX polish is the moat that free has never been able to cross.
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > Do people buy chat apps? Web browsers? Web servers? Web content? Yes. (Slack. Orion. Since when were servers free?) The web basically fractures into people who watch ads and complain about paywalls and those who don’t.
      - scarface_74 1y ago
        People don’t buy Slack. Corporations do. They also buy Teams…
        JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > People don’t buy Slack. Corporations do. One, corporate cash is just as good as people cash. Two, people absolutely paid for WhatsApp before it was acquired. And three, I am a people and I personally pay for Microsoft 365 and on occasion have used Teams.
        scarface_74 1y ago
        B2B sales by definition is where the buyer is not the user. The software doesn’t have to be anything the end user wants or have a good user experience. In corporate sells, it often just has to be in the right upper quadrant of Gartner’s Magic Square. They definitely weren’t bought by corporations because they care about open standards or great UX.
        JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > weren’t bought by corporations because they care about open standards or great UX OP said open products lose because they lack “UI/UX polish.”
        JustExAWS 1y ago
        And how many B2B apps have you used that have “polish”? Slack is okay. But at the end of the day, it’s another crappy Electron app.
    - newyorkahh 1y ago
      You’re right, but browsers are free because their cost is a drop in the bucket compared to the profits a monopolized browser status quo provides, for Windows/Office in 90s snd search/ads with Google. MS started it with free IE and Google improved upon their strategy.
    - queenkjuul 1y ago
      If the "spy on users and sell the data" business model were illegal, you bet your ass people would pay for chat. People were paying per message to send SMS once upon a time!
- piva00 1y ago
  People definitely do pay for it when it's available, even more at the core of this issue is that people would prefer alternatives that are open, where their data can be easily ported to some competitor service if it's better which directly affects the bottomline from companies that push against open standards. I think you got it clearly reversed in your mind...
  - api 1y ago
    They prefer it but they don’t pay for it.
    - piva00 1y ago
      They also don't pay for the non-standards stuff, what's your point? Chrome, Facebook, Instagram. For the paid services like Apple's there's no even an alternative following open standards. They don't pay because there are no options of services provided by these companies following open standards, exactly because companies wouldn't be able to lock users in their solutions if open standards were commonly deployed and used...
      - aspenmayer 1y ago
        It's kind of a chicken and egg problem. Let's say for the sake of the argument that you can check out all the data and metadata from all of the sites you want to. Now what? Where would you check it in? "Build it and they will come" kinda falls flat when there's no there there to, you know, build it. It's like advocating for building a highway to the middle of nowhere because in our mind the field of dreams is inside all of us, so the center of the universe would be ideal, but there are already things built there and we want folks to appreciate the game and our collective love of it, so we had to build it way out here. Open standards are one part of "building it," but not the whole of it, so it might be a bit premature to be asking where everybody is. You have to draw the rest of the owl. We're building sandcastles in the sky. What is the point of all these column inches if it doesn't lend itself to building the destinations that you wish to visit? The best defense is a good offense. Whining and complaining can help identify a problem and motivate others to share your view that the problem exists and is worth solving. Making new year's resolutions and telling folks about it isn't actually doing the work. Community organizing is like step 0. Now comes the actually hard part, being the change you want to see in the world.
StopDisinfo910 1y ago
To be honest, in my recollection, in 2013 what the W3C was doing was actually seen as user hostile and HTML5 was seen as a good thing for users. Part of the community really hated XHTML and its strictness. I remember Mozilla being at the vanguard then rather than Google. I think the situation was and is a lot more messy and complicated than what the article presents but presenting it fully would make for a less compelling narrative. As is I don’t really buy it personally.
- newyorkahh 1y ago
  Hostile actions would be IE’s strategy for monopolizing browser in 90s and Google paying Apple and Mozilla to monopolize search starting in 2004, killing off Reader in 2013. Taking over standards groups is a gray area with tradeoffs. It helped Google preserve monopoly in search but clearly devs and the web benefited as well. XHTML2 was panned because it was super strict without clear benefits. Keeping HTML backwards compatible is clearly a very good thing. I don’t fully understand the author’s passion for XSLT- it’s cumbersome and it wasn’t popular with devs. I agree with the headline and some aspects but XML is a bad hill to die on and much of the writing is hyperbolic and more than a little out of touch.
- Devasta 1y ago
  > Part of the community really hated XHTML and its strictness. A big part of this is that people were concatenating XML together manually, to predictable disaster. Nowadays they use JSX and TypeScript, far more strict than XML ever was, and absolutely love it.
  - isodev 1y ago
    > Nowadays they use JSX and TypeScript And we're already moving away from that, landing us into HTMX/hypermedia and other fancy tools which aren't really concerned with JSX. So things come and go, but standards stay to keep things working and options available for people with different constraints. It's not up to Google to be deciding all that just by themselves.
- int_19h 1y ago

by isodev 1y ago

api 1y ago

Nobody pays for anything with user centric standards. If software were free to produce and services were free to run this would work, but it doesn’t. Software in particular is incredibly time consuming and expensive, especially if you want to make it usable.

wobfan 1y ago
> Nobody pays for anything with user centric standards. ??? Why do you think this?
- api 1y ago
  Do people buy chat apps? Web browsers? Web servers? Web content? Clients or servers for other open standards? No, which means you’ll never see them get the level of polish or investment that closed stuff gets. Because when it’s closed you can make people pay or monetize it with advertising. I’m not cheering for this. Don’t shoot the messenger. I’m pointing out why things are this way. A major problem is that while free software efforts can build working software, it often takes orders of magnitude more work to make software mere mortals can use. That kind of UI/UX polish is also the work programmers hate doing, so you have to pay them to do it. Therefore closed stuff always wins on UI/UX. That means it always takes the network effect. UX polish is the moat that free has never been able to cross.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > Do people buy chat apps? Web browsers? Web servers? Web content? Yes. (Slack. Orion. Since when were servers free?) The web basically fractures into people who watch ads and complain about paywalls and those who don’t.
    - scarface_74 1y ago
      People don’t buy Slack. Corporations do. They also buy Teams…
      - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > People don’t buy Slack. Corporations do. One, corporate cash is just as good as people cash. Two, people absolutely paid for WhatsApp before it was acquired. And three, I am a people and I personally pay for Microsoft 365 and on occasion have used Teams.
        scarface_74 1y ago
        B2B sales by definition is where the buyer is not the user. The software doesn’t have to be anything the end user wants or have a good user experience. In corporate sells, it often just has to be in the right upper quadrant of Gartner’s Magic Square. They definitely weren’t bought by corporations because they care about open standards or great UX.
        JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > weren’t bought by corporations because they care about open standards or great UX OP said open products lose because they lack “UI/UX polish.”
        JustExAWS 1y ago
        And how many B2B apps have you used that have “polish”? Slack is okay. But at the end of the day, it’s another crappy Electron app.
  - newyorkahh 1y ago
    You’re right, but browsers are free because their cost is a drop in the bucket compared to the profits a monopolized browser status quo provides, for Windows/Office in 90s snd search/ads with Google. MS started it with free IE and Google improved upon their strategy.
  - queenkjuul 1y ago
    If the "spy on users and sell the data" business model were illegal, you bet your ass people would pay for chat. People were paying per message to send SMS once upon a time!
piva00 1y ago
People definitely do pay for it when it's available, even more at the core of this issue is that people would prefer alternatives that are open, where their data can be easily ported to some competitor service if it's better which directly affects the bottomline from companies that push against open standards. I think you got it clearly reversed in your mind...
- api 1y ago
  They prefer it but they don’t pay for it.
  - piva00 1y ago
    They also don't pay for the non-standards stuff, what's your point? Chrome, Facebook, Instagram. For the paid services like Apple's there's no even an alternative following open standards. They don't pay because there are no options of services provided by these companies following open standards, exactly because companies wouldn't be able to lock users in their solutions if open standards were commonly deployed and used...
    - aspenmayer 1y ago
      It's kind of a chicken and egg problem. Let's say for the sake of the argument that you can check out all the data and metadata from all of the sites you want to. Now what? Where would you check it in? "Build it and they will come" kinda falls flat when there's no there there to, you know, build it. It's like advocating for building a highway to the middle of nowhere because in our mind the field of dreams is inside all of us, so the center of the universe would be ideal, but there are already things built there and we want folks to appreciate the game and our collective love of it, so we had to build it way out here. Open standards are one part of "building it," but not the whole of it, so it might be a bit premature to be asking where everybody is. You have to draw the rest of the owl. We're building sandcastles in the sky. What is the point of all these column inches if it doesn't lend itself to building the destinations that you wish to visit? The best defense is a good offense. Whining and complaining can help identify a problem and motivate others to share your view that the problem exists and is worth solving. Making new year's resolutions and telling folks about it isn't actually doing the work. Community organizing is like step 0. Now comes the actually hard part, being the change you want to see in the world.

StopDisinfo910 1y ago

To be honest, in my recollection, in 2013 what the W3C was doing was actually seen as user hostile and HTML5 was seen as a good thing for users. Part of the community really hated XHTML and its strictness. I remember Mozilla being at the vanguard then rather than Google. I think the situation was and is a lot more messy and complicated than what the article presents but presenting it fully would make for a less compelling narrative. As is I don’t really buy it personally.

newyorkahh 1y ago
Hostile actions would be IE’s strategy for monopolizing browser in 90s and Google paying Apple and Mozilla to monopolize search starting in 2004, killing off Reader in 2013. Taking over standards groups is a gray area with tradeoffs. It helped Google preserve monopoly in search but clearly devs and the web benefited as well. XHTML2 was panned because it was super strict without clear benefits. Keeping HTML backwards compatible is clearly a very good thing. I don’t fully understand the author’s passion for XSLT- it’s cumbersome and it wasn’t popular with devs. I agree with the headline and some aspects but XML is a bad hill to die on and much of the writing is hyperbolic and more than a little out of touch.
Devasta 1y ago
> Part of the community really hated XHTML and its strictness. A big part of this is that people were concatenating XML together manually, to predictable disaster. Nowadays they use JSX and TypeScript, far more strict than XML ever was, and absolutely love it.
- isodev 1y ago
  > Nowadays they use JSX and TypeScript And we're already moving away from that, landing us into HTMX/hypermedia and other fancy tools which aren't really concerned with JSX. So things come and go, but standards stay to keep things working and options available for people with different constraints. It's not up to Google to be deciding all that just by themselves.
int_19h 1y ago