Fear and Loathing on the Standards Trail (with an Upbeat Coda)
August 19th, 2008
At the Mozilla Summit, I held a session on Standards. The organizational powers that be gave me the Big Room, and before long I stood in relative darkness on stage discussing standards with the mavens within our community that pay attention to such things.
Now, standards are a big deal to us — everything we do here at Mozilla is, for the most part, a contribution to the Web platform. I blogged previously about the low esteem I reserve for arguments that favor proprietary platforms (which typically pit rapid proprietary innovation against dawdling Web Platform standardization cycles), but even in that upbeat blog post, I acknowledge that the standards process leaves much room for improvement.
My slides basically summarize the numerous places we go to build interoperable specifications, even though some of these places are theoretical at the moment (meaning we aren’t quite going there yet), and the activities we’re currently involved in. But, I was most interested in the audience participation part. That’s where I got to talk to folks working on stuff pertinent to standards, and to listen to their points of view.
After Oslo: Thoughts on Harmony and Evolution
August 15th, 2008
Standards meetings rarely generate the kind of buzz that the ECMAScript meeting Brendan and I attended in Oslo did; check out John Resig’s blog post, and then Doug Crockford’s. And, there’s also the Open Web Podcast on ECMAScript Harmonization that John Resig, Alex Russell, and Dion Almaer hosted Brendan and I on. Turns out that time spent indoors with computer language design mavens in sunny Oslo in late July have sowed the seeds of harmony. But first, some back story.
Just So Stories about why exactly JavaScript became the de facto programming language of the web abound; that it is very popular is either a blessing or a curse for its creator, who says he still sees it as the “quickie love child between C and Self.” Its programming language antecedents, at least in terms of inspiration and influence, have resulted in a language with Java-like syntax, Scheme-like first class functions, and Self-like prototypes. It is implemented, with differences, in every browser, and is here to stay. But how should it evolve? As an integral part of the web platform, what should it be capable of in the future? And, what guiding principles should inform these weighty decisions? Glad you asked. This is a blog post about harmony in the ECMAScript process; or, about how opinionated technologists forgo stalemates and arrive at some measure of reconciliation.
Building the Web, One Spec at a Time
July 16th, 2008
(Cross-posted from arunranga.com)
I’m admittedly being a bit glib in my title. Can innovation and advancement of the web platform occur at all, given the temporal straight jacket that standards bodies sometimes impose? There are certainly proprietary platforms that leverage the web (Flash and Silverlight) and developers do happily bivouac in them, building some fairly compelling stuff. Some even argue that these proprietary platforms push the envelope more than what the web can do by itself, given the stagnancy of standards bodies.
But let’s talk about the web platform. Stagnant, really? Innovation at Mozilla ultimately manifests itself as innovation for the web platform. Let’s leave the intricacies of the standards process for another discussion — it isn’t ideal, and big questions about consortia (like W3C and ECMA) are probably valid ones. Great ideas are vetted for interoperability in forums such as the WHATWG, and the W3C’s WebApps WG, and we browser vendors deliver as rapidly as feasible on implementations (some are slower than others — you know who you are). Both IE8 Beta and Firefox 3 now support postMessage, for example, so talk of AJAX methodologies being stagnant ought to be revisited. And support of Canvas2D in browsers such as Opera, Safari, and Firefox results in stellar innovations such as processing.js, which — any “open platform” chauvinism on my part notwithstanding — gives Flash a royal run for its money.
Mozilla’s involvement in standards encompasses enhancements to JavaScript, graphics, and APIs for new capabilities. Below is a breakdown of the work that will eventually be a part of the web platform. Don’t stop and stare for too long — there is nothing stagnating here 