OpenWeb 05/12/2009 (a.m.)
W3C Kills HTML-CSS 1998: Hixie's Natural Log
In 2004 Ian Hickson attended the W3C workgroup on XHTML and CDF. He notes the fact that, as Steven Pemberton pointed out, six year ago (1998), the W3C decided that HTML was dead, and the way forward was a host of new languages (what is now XHTML2, XForms, MathML, SVG) that would lead the world's population to a clean new world. Then he has this to say: ".... The truth is that the real Web, the Web that authors write for, is the Windows IE6 Web. The only way to change that is to reduce the IE6 market share, and new technologies don't do this. Marketing does. Once users are primarily using a browser that is being regularly updated, then we can start introducing radically new technologies. Until then, such technologies simply aren't going to become popular. There were a lot of rather confused statements during the meeting. For example, it is clear that a lot of people think that the browser is dead and that the way forward is transparent "runtimes" that execute remote applications securely. But then these same people demand to know why Mozilla, Opera and Safari don't support XForms and SVG, saying that their lack of support is crippling their standards' adoption. Surely if the browser paradigm is dead, it doesn't matter what we implement? What I think most of the people at the meeting actually want is a standard that combines XHTML, XForms, SVG, and SMIL (and CSS, DOM, and ECMAScript, although they rarely if ever actually mention those by name), and then adds enough APIs to make the host into a platform in its own right. ..."
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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