A few weeks ago, I attended the W3C Workshop on Web Applications and Compound documents in San Jose. Sarah Allen presented on behalf of Laszlo, with a position paper on Web UI titled The Future of the Web is not the Past of Windows.
This was my first exposure to a standards body meeting, and some of the perspectives were surprising. Attendees included representatives of Adobe (who hosted the workshop), Microsoft, IBM, Sun, the Mozilla Foundation, Opera, OpenWave, Nokia, France Telecom and more.
The meeting seemed to have been motivated by the growing interest in supporting interactive applications on the Web, and the challenges to the W3C standards posed by proprietary solutions in this area such as Microsoft's XAML.
The viewpoints expressed on the first day seemed to fall into four categories:
What I found especially surprising was the lack of acknowledgement of the reality of the browser market. Putting aside mobile devices for a moment, how is it that W3C members (including WHAT-WG) see any of these changes hitting the market?
Given Internet Explorer's lock on the browser market (and on the distribution channel for the browser), how is it that anything will change in the browser (such as implementing XForms, SVG, or some hypothetical extension of DHTML) without Microsoft deciding to make it so? Knowing that development of Internet Explorer has essentially stopped should be a major red flag to this group, yet I did not see this fact acknowledged -- to the point that a W3C representative challenged one of the Microsoft attendees to tell him "why should we listen to you?" Baffling.I see HTML/DHTML staying around indefinitely -- under no circumstance will Microsoft or anyone else truly replace it -- but being relegated over time to a document format, not a way of writing networked applications. It is difficult to imagine that the thorny issues of integrating multiple complex XML languages (SVG, XForms, XHTML) will happen in a timely manner or result in a framework which is easily learned -- particularly when there aren't widely deployed browsers that implement this hypothetical integrated standard. It is also difficult to imagine that application authors on the Web will avoid the temptation of creating XAML/Longhorn apps just because XAML is proprietary -- do Web authors avoid IE-specific DHTML today?
What will stem the XAML tide is an alternative application markup technology that is deployable across the Web, and not specific to Windows. Coming from the W3C viewpoint, this would be a difficult problem to solve considering the realities of what it would take to upgrade the browser and get it installed on everyone's desktop. I'd go so far as to say that even if the perfect XForms-SVG-XHTML browser were available right now, worked perfectly, and required only a tiny download, it would still gain only negligible browser market share. Any actual development and deployment scenario will only be more challenging.
At Laszlo, we believe we have this technology today -- an XML Web application language that can run in any browser, not just on Windows or Windows Longhorn. It is not currently itself a standard, though it incorporates a number of W3C standards. It is not Slashdot-compliant, since it relies on a ubiquitous, well-documented (though proprietary) plug-in. But it is well-specified, comparatively easy to learn, and utterly practical for deployment right now. Is it more important that a technology be approved by a standards body, or that it works the same everywhere, reliably, today?