Here, here! Doug has it exactly right. Innovation flies in the face of standards, and by its success, can become a kind of standard, even if it's not "the" standard. Lots of standards become that way after the fact. Even when the success is, well, questionable, it can become a standard after the fact. The NTSC/VC-1 with Microsoft comes to mind. The Blu-Ray/HD-DVD war had as much to do with H.264 vs. VC-1 video standards as it did the actual disc standards.
It is easy enough to argue that Microsoft is the great boat anchor of web standards. Fine. I can see lots of business reasons for that. Whether it's open source or Adobe moving ahead anyway, that's another business decision. But innovation is going to happen, just as it always has, with or without a committee standard. That's great news. Will Flash get on the iPhone? Which is a proprietary, non-standard, but-now-a-standard-unto-itself platform? Maybe, maybe not, for techincal and/or business reasons. Is the Flash platform being proprietary bad? No. Is having to learn to program the iPhone SDK bad? No. My point? Don't hold your breath, or waste any breath over committee standards. It's really okay to just enjoy the innovation that is taking place, proprietary or not. It's also okay to develop on more than one platform. - Cole ________________________________ From: Doug McCune <d...@dougmccune.com> To: flexcoders@yahoogroups.com Sent: Tuesday, January 27, 2009 9:23:11 AM Subject: Re: [flexcoders] Flex. AIR and IPhone Apologies for how long this email became, but I was reading around on the trusty wikipedia and wanted to try to clear up some things about the "success" of the existing web standards. I don't want this to come off as too much of a rant, but it proably will. Let's take a look at the history of CSS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSS): CSS level 1: November 4, 1997 CSS level 2: May 12, 1998 CSS level 3: began 1998, still unfinished A brief excerpt: The CSS Working Group began tackling issues that had not been addressed with CSS level 1, resulting in the creation of CSS level 2 on November 4, 1997. It was published as a W3C Recommendation on May 12, 1998. CSS level 3, which was started in 1998, is still under development as of 2008. In 2005 the CSS Working Groups decided to enforce the requirements for standards more strictly. This meant that already published standards like CSS 2.1, CSS 3 Selectors and CSS 3 Text were pulled back from Candidate Recommendation to Working Draft level. And if you really want to have fun look at the half-assed implementation of CSS across the many browsers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_layout_engines_(CSS). It's been 10 years since CSS 2 was written (10 years!) and yet there still isn't even consistent implementation of that. And CSS 3 implementation is a joke. Maybe HTML is better, let's look at that (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML#Version_history_of_the_standard): HTML 2: 1995 HTML 3.2 recommendation: January, 1997 HTML 4 recommendation: December, 1997 HTML 5 working draft: January 2008 (10 years!) Hmm, maybe we can look at ECMAScript, the standard controlling JavaScript development (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript) ECMAScript 1: June 1997 ECMAScript 2: June 1998 ECMAScript 3: December 1999 Added E4X to ECMAScript: June 2004 ECMAScript 4: scrapped ECMAScript Harmony: in development And now, finally, we'll look at the timeline of Flash/ActionScript: Flash Player 2: 1997 Flash Player 3: 1998 Flash Player 4: May, 1999 Flash Player 5: August 2000 ActionScript 1: September, 2000 Flash Player 6: March 2002 Flash Player 7: September 2003 ActionScript 2: September 2003 Flash Player 8: August 2005 Flah Player 9: June 2006 ActionScript 3: June 2006 Flash Player 10: October 2008 So for literally the past 10 years the standards bodies haven't been able to release a single completed specification. That goes for HTML, CSS, and ECMASCript (the closest would be the draft of the unimplemented HTML 5 that was released a year ago). The entire "standards-based web" is running on stuff that was written before the dot-com bubble burst! Now look at how Flash has progressed since 1999. That includes the complete evolution of ActionScript all the way from the very first version to the AS3 (including the recent Vector, etc enhancements that come with Player 10). The entire evolution of AS3 occurred after the last ECMAScript spec was written. CSS 3 started development in 1998 and still isn't finished. In that same time period we went from Flash Player 3 to 10. I'm not holding my breath for anything new coming out of these standards groups. 10 years and they can't write a specification. The entire world changes in 10 years. Doug
