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 binding model for OOXML is "Smart Documents", and it is proprietary!
Smart Documents is how data, streaming media, scripting-routing-workflow intelligence and metadata is added to any document object.
Think of the ODF binding model using XForms, XML/RDF and RDFA metadata. One could even use Jabber XMP as a binding model, which is how we did the Comcast SOA based Sales and Inventory Management System prototype.
Interestingly, Smart Documents is based on pre written widgets that can simply be dragged, dropped and bound to any document object. The Infopath applicaiton provides a highly visual means for end users to build intelligent self routing forms. But Visual Studio .NET, which was released with MSOffice 2007 in December of 2006. makes it very easy for application and line of business integration developers to implement very advanced data binding using the Smart Document widgets.
I would also go as far to say that what separates MSOOXML from Ecma 376 is going to be primarily Smart Documents.
Yes, there are .NET Framework Libraries and Vista Stack dependencies like XAML that will also provide a proprietary "Vista Stack" only barrier to interoperability, but Smart Documents is a killer.
One company that will be particularly hurt by Smart Documents is Google. The reason is that the business value of Google Search is based on using advanced and closely held proprietary algorithms to provide metadata structure for unstrucutred documents.
This was great for a world awash in unstructured documents. By moving the "XML" structuring of documents down to the author - workgroup - workflow application level though, the world will soon enough be awash in highly structured documents that have end user metadata defining document objects and