I’ve been reading with great interest the current concern over the W3C process for web standards and the lack of progress being made. Andy Clarke kicked it off by asking the W3C to disband the CSS working group. Alex Russell followed up declaring that the W3C Cannot Save Us. Jeff Croft, playing his usual role of rabble rouser, echoes Alex’s sentiments in an post entitled, “Do We Need a Return to Browser Wars.
I can’t speak to the internal politics in these organizations, but I do have two perspectives on these issues based on my background in standards and mobile development that I haven’t seen discussed yet.
In all three articles, but in particular in a related article by James Bennett, the authors are seeking a new model for standards-setting organizations. In the case of Jeff Croft and Alex Russell, they believe that the standards bodies will never innovate. James Bennett looks for other models and even goes so far as to say:
This brings us to a new question: how do we find the proper balance between the competing interests of Web vendors and Web users/developers? Personally, I think the answer is to look at the available history: the world of web standards is not really breaking new ground in needing to properly strike this sort of balance, and there’s already a long and rich history of groups going through precisely this process, which anyone who’s interested in reforming web standards should be looking at.
Unfortunately, James follows by pointing to open source communities as an example of groups that have been successful. I don’t disagree that there aren’t lessons to be learned from open source groups. I just thought for the first time I was going to hear someone talk about learning how to be successful in standards development by learning from what other standards development groups do.
At my previous job, the biggest challenge we had was marketing to people in standards organizations who didn’t recognize that the standards setting process is unique and there is much to be learned from other standards organizations.
What many in standards organizations lack is the awareness that they are not only professionals within whatever field is their day-to-day jobs, but they also should be looking to others to understand their profession as members of standards organizations.
In this case, those who want to see the W3C do a better job at driving innovation and being more open would be wise to ask questions of
I’m enamored with the lines that are blurring between the desktop and the web. Adobe’s AIR application is a great example of this mixture of desktop code and web code. Now both Safari and Firefox are supporting Simple DB as a way to provide offline access to web applications and then later syncing them back to the web. Another example of this trend is the creation of application specific browsers. This doesn’t mean you have a browser that will only run one web site. Instead, it means that if you use a web site on a regular basis, it may make sense to have that web site running in a browser that isn’t your primary browser so that it is isolated from your other browsing. Why would it make sense to have it isolated? Say you’re a web developer who spends a lot of time using Basecamp. You have Basecamp in a tab while you’re working in another tab. If the content of one of the other tabs crashes your browser, you lose your work. In addition, you have to dig through the tabs to find the tab that matters to you. If Basecamp were in a separate application, you could simply switch to that application and have that application isolated from your other web browsing. Here are two programs designed to allow you to create web site specific applications quickly: Both beta applications and neither require you to know anything about creating a web site to use them. Evan Williams has a very useful post describing a different matrix to use when evaluating ideas for new businesses–particularly technology companies. Over the years, I’ve talked to a lot of people about what their business ideas. Many of the ideas fail to pass more than a couple of the criteria that Evan describes. During these casual conversations, I’ve struggled to figure out how to help people see the same picture I did about the likelihood of their ideas being successful. I don’t want to discourage them from pursuing their dreams—there are far too many people already discouraging people from taking risks. At the same time, I want to help people understand where the limits of their idea are and help them have a realistic picture of the challenges they face. The next time I find myself in one of these conversations, I’m going to point them to Evan’s post to help them evaluate their own idea. Maybe this will help us develop a common language to use when discussing how the viability of the idea. Steve Souders, Yahoo’s Chief Performance Officer and the author of High Performance Web Sites, is leaving Yahoo to join Google. Most of the media coverage of his announcement has focused on a narrative of Yahoo’s demise. The Information Week article that I linked to above is probably the most neutral article I could find, and it still slants towards making a bigger deal of this change than it probably is. I’m not much interested in whether or not this represents a larger trend for Yahoo. What matters for those who are concerned about site performance is that Steve has been publishing some of the best research recently on these topics. I hope he will continue to be able to publish new research and techniques while at Google.
Blurring Lines Between Desktop and Web
links for 2008-01-05
links for 2008-01-03
links for 2008-01-02
How to Evaluate a New Product Idea
Steve Souders to Join Google