Is the Pretense of the Open Web Gone?

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This is interesting. Mozilla is looking at a way to bring accelerated 3D to the web. Christopher Blizzard has more information on his blog and a couple of good quotes:

We’ve started to see more and more libraries being built to support use cases with Canvas in a 2D context but we really want to take things to the next level and start to allow people to use 3D capabilities as well. Accelerated 3D graphics with the super-fast next-generation JavaScript engines from nearly every web browser vendor means that we’re going to be able to start to see more and more advanced applications written using open web technologies. 3D is a huge part of that story and we’re happy to bring our proposal to the table.

As an Adobe employee, though a big supporter of Flash, I also wish we did more to encourage and foster the open web. The problem is that the standards process is completely broken. You simply can’t innovate that way and it looks like the browser vendors themselves are at the point where they’re pushing their own various priorities and standards so they don’t get left behind. The unfortunate thing is that the standards are what really make the open web open. Sure, you can open source something and claim it’s open, but it’s the standards that give everyone a reference implementation. It’s the standards that aim to level the playing field and make developers lives easier. It’s the standards that keep the open web open.

Probably a hilarious thought coming from a guy who makes his living off of Flash, but I’ve always been of the opinion that we as a company should roll our innovations back into the HTML world. The problem is that even if we did that, we’d have to work within the constraints of the committees, so the open web would always lag behind Flash and in some cases possibly never adopt the better parts of the platform. To me, that’s fine, Flash will always have a place on the web, and Adobe makes some great tools for open web designers and developers. I always thought it was win-win.

So it’s unfortunate to see that even the browser vendors have given up on moving the open web forward through standards. Whether it’s the WHATWG versus the W3C or the trials and tribulations of actually implementing HTML5, things are very broken and everyone is moving on regardless. I don’t blame any of them, but it doesn’t seem like it’s good for web developers.

Related posts:

  1. Unhelpful Rhetoric and Adobe’s Place in the Open Web
  2. Adobe Open Screen Project – Open Specifications and Open Technology to Help Expand Flash Player Reach
  3. The Open Web Is Slow
  4. Do I Really Care if The Flash Player is Open Sourced? Not So Much
  5. Is Being Too Open with Products a Bad Thing?
  • http://polyGeek.com polyGeek

    It’s amazing the work that goes into HTML/CSS standards. I don’t get it. The only HTML tags anyone would ever need is Object/Embed. :)

  • Harry

    Perhaps it’s that innovation happens in one phase, and then open standards happen in the next.

    W3C isn’t just now getting behind the times. They have always been behind the times. It’s their job to ensure that they are standardizing something solid rather than something trendy that won’t have staying power.

    So for right now, I’m just gonna sit back, add a few more tweens to a few more rotationY properties, and give them something new to standardize!

  • Bjorn Schultheiss

    If this article is a dig at mozilla trying to bring them down to the level of Adobe, then that’s a pretty lame argument.

    The fact that flash is closed means as a developer i have to consider whether to use flash or js based on there capabilities.

    If it was all open i feel we would be 5 years ahead in available capabilities than what we currently are.

  • JulesLt

    Harry – that’s very much it. If you read Tim Berners-Lee’s ‘Weaving the Web’ you realise that HTML and XML 1.0 were innovation phase – you can see that by all the sensible and more complex changes since.

    C, Unix, Linux (LSB) are also all examples of technologies where the ‘standardisation’ phase came later – and indeed the same is true of many other programming languages.

    I’m still not 100% convinced of the idea of downloading vast chunks of JavaScript when I visit web-sites – browser vendors need to sort out something like Flash RSL for JavaScript frameworks, or we will have the worst of both worlds.

  • ryanstewart

    @Bjorn, nope, it’s not meant as a dig against Mozilla. Google has been arguably the worst offender but I feel like Mozilla has been taking the high road in most situations. As I said, I don’t blame them, but the fact that they’re starting to move in the same direction as everyone else was notable.

    @JulesLt, I like the RSL idea for JavaScript frameworks. Definitely an area where Adobe could provide soe good input and ideas I think.

    =Ryan

  • http://fupeg.blogspot.com Michael

    Browsers have pushed their own innovations for a long time. Standards always lag, and are often more of a matter of politics than anything else. Let’s not forget that Microsoft invented XMLHttpRequest. It was no standard. Others copied it and only then did it become a standard. Canvas was invented by Safari, only later on it became a standard and was adopted by Mozilla. It is a worthless standard though, because of the 75% of browsers (flavors of IE) that do not implement it.

    @JulesLt — RSL for JavaScript? Most major sites put their common JS in a shared file, put an expiry date far in the future, and push that to a CDN. That gives you everything an RSL gives you. If you want to cache across sites, you could use Google’s Ajax Libraries: http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlibs/ . That’s even better than RSLs, since you cache across sites, something you can only currently do with the Flex framework.

  • Robert O’Callahan

    We’ve been incubating our canvas3d experiment at Mozilla for a while now, but we haven’t shipped anything in a product. The announcement you link to is about getting Khronos involved. Khronos is a standards organization, they manage OpenGL.

    So we announce we’re working with a recognized standards organization to standardize Canvas 3D, before we ship anything, and you take that as a cue to comment about how browser vendors aren’t working with standards? Weird.