Is HTML in a Race to the Bottom? A Large-Scale Survey of Open Web Formats

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 17:53:06 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

The "race to the bottom" is a familiar phenomenon that occurs when multiple standards compete for acceptance. In this environment, the most lenient standard usually attracts the greatest support (acceptance, usage, and so on), leading to a competition among standards to be less stringent. This also tends to drive competing standards toward the minimum possible level of quality. One key prerequisite for a race to the bottom is an unregulated market because regulators mandate a minimum acceptable quality for standards and sanction those who don't comply.^1,2 In examining current HTML standards, we've come to suspect that a race to the bottom could, in fact, be occurring because so many competing versions of HTML exist.

At this time, some nine different versions of HTML (including its successor, XHTML) are supported as W3C standards, with the most up-to-date being XHTML 1.1. Although some versions are very old and lack some of the newer versions' capabilities, others are reasonably contemporaneous. In particular, HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 both have "transitional" and "strict" versions. Clearly, the W3C's intent is to provide a pathway to move from HTML 4.01 to XHTML 1.1, and the transitional versions are steps on that path. It also aims to develop XHTML standards that support device independence (everything from desktops to cell phones), accessibility, and internationalization. As part of this effort, HTML 4.01's presentational elements (used to adjust the appearance of a page for older browsers that don't support style sheets) are eliminated in XHTML 1.1.

Our concern is that Web site designers might decline to follow the newer versions' more stringent formatting requirements and will instead keep using transitional versions. To determine if this is likely, we surveyed the top 100,000 most popular Web sites to discover what versions of HTML are in widespread use.

The summary statement glosses over the value of a highly structured portable XML document. A value that goes far beyond the strict separation of content and presentation. The portable document model is the essential means by which information is exchanged over the Web. It is the key to Web interop.

Up till now, Web docuemnts have been very limited. With the advent of XHTML-2, CSS-3, SVG, XForms and CDF (Compound Document Framework for putting these pieces together), the W3C has provisioned the Web with the means of publishing and exchanging highly interactive but very complex docuemnts. The Web documents of the future will be every bit as complex as the publishing industry needs.
The transition of complex and data rich desktop office suite documents to the Web has been non existent up till now. With ISO approval of MSOffice-OOXML, Microsoft is now ready to transition billions of business process rich "office" documents to the Web.
This transition is accomplished by a very clever conversion component included in the MSOffice SDK. MS Developers can easily convert OOXML documents to Web ready XAML documents, adn back again, without loss of presentation fidelity, or data. No matter what the complexity!

The problem here is that while MSOffice-OOXML is now an ISO/IEC International Standard, XAML "fixed/flow" is a proprietary format useful only to the IE-8 browser, the MS Web Stack (Exchange, SharePoint, MS SQL, and Windows Server), and the emerging MS Cloud.

Apache, J2EE, Mozilla Firefox, Adobe and Open Source Servers in general will not be able to render these complex, business process rich, office suite documents. MSOffice-OOXML itself is far to complicated and filled with MS application-platform-vendor specific dependencies to be usefully converted to Open Web XHTML-CSS, ePUB or CDF.

XAML itself is only the tip of the iceberg. The Microsoft Web Stack also implements Silverlight, Smart Tags and other WPF - .NET technologies not available as open standards. Silverlight is a proprietary alternative to SVG and Flash technologies. Smart Tags and the LINQ meta search mechanism are alternatives to RDF, RDFa and SPARQL. And of course, XAML "fixed/flow" is a proprietary alternative to advanced XHTML-CSS, CDF, iPAPER, FlashPaper and PDF.

Web formats are important. This survey sadly only begins to scrape the surface of the interoperability problems the future of the Open Web faces. ISO approval of MSOffice-OOXML is going to initiate a great transition of legacy client/server business process systems to a new model of highly efficient, barrier free and cloud ready client/ Web-Stack /server systems.

Hope this helps,

~ge~
posted by garyedwards

Tags: cdf css html ooxml xaml xhtml

Posted by: garyedwards

IE aims to embrace the web again | Technology | The Guardian

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 19:42:35 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

I asked Hachamovitch, who has led the Explorer team since 2003, why it has taken Microsoft so long to address these deficiencies. "It comes down to what we were doing with our time," he said. "Between 2001 and 2003 we were building what you experience now as Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight."

These technologies display not HTML, the language of web pages, but XAML, Microsoft's proprietary code for creating rich visual content.

Tags: css hachamovitch html ie microsoft silverlight w3c wpf xaml xhtml

Posted by: garyedwards

OpenDocument's feed | Diigo Group

Is HTML in a Race to the Bottom? A Large-Scale Survey of Open Web Formats

IE aims to embrace the web again | Technology | The Guardian