On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 11:33 AM, Andrew S. Baker <[email protected]> wrote: > HTML5 is no panacea, either... It's a loosely defined "standard" that will > be > even more loosely adhered to. Welcome back to 1999.
HTML 5 is on the W3C standards track. It's still in draft status, but my understanding is that it's not radically changing anymore -- they're just finishing up the rough edges. Compliance with any standard is always an issue, but with a neutral, open standard you at least have something people can work towards. HTML 4, CSS, and JavaScript took time to converge, too, but it has mostly happened and continues to improve. > Proprietary plug-ins aren't necessarily a bad thing. Yes, they are. They limit implementations to whoever owns the rights, excluding other implementations. No competition means you're stuck with whatever is out there. Indeed, I would argue that the Flash situation sucks so much precisely *because* it's a proprietary offering. If it was a *true* open standard[1] we'd have competing implementations and a way out. Remember when Microsoft had nearly taken over the browser world? We sat on IE 6 for *years* and *years*. There was *zero* progress being made. Then the Mozilla project came along and actually started giving Microsoft a reason to care again. The limitations of proprietary offerings also mean you have trouble doing new, clever, and/or creative things -- alternative clients, or user interfaces, or automation, or machine recognition, etc., etc. "Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network." (Tim Berners-Lee) -- Ben [1] Flash is not open, regardless of what Adobe claims. What few specs there are are woefully incomplete and hopelessly out-of-date. Third-party implementations have to resort to reverse engineering and bug-for-bug compatibility, while also negotiating the patent minefield. ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
