I attended a rather direct and revealing talk given by Alex Russel the project lead for the Dojo Toolkit. Given the importance of the Dojo toolkit I was curious to see what Alex would have to say. His talk, titled “Standards Heresy” with the subtitle of “Dojo and the Rise of Open Web Pragmatism” focused at length on standards – what makes a good standard, how does it relate to competition, what makes a good standards body, and so on?
So why the focus on standards? Douglas Crockford, a senior JavaScript architect at Yahoo and creator of JSON gave the keynote speech in which he pointed out a number of failures of rich web development as realized in browsers to date. The notable failures are what he calls “insecurity” or the lack of security on the browser side (e.g. any JavaScript code downloaded as part of your page has access to any other data on the page including cookes, session id’s, etc.) and the lack of advancement in presentation technology (HTML 4.0 dates back to 1999). According to him standards bodies have failed us and it is a striking conclusion considering the fact the number of mainstream browsers isn’t that big.
Continuing on this theme Alex Russel drew out the W3C specification timeline. What we have is HTML 4.01 in 1999, XHTML 1.0 in 2002, DOM 3 Core in 2004, CSS 2.1 in 2007, (CSS 2.0 dates back to 1998). HTML 5 is scheduled for late 2008 and CSS 3 according to him is a mess. Enter WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Group). This group is focused on evolving HTML in parallel with the W3C HTML working group and the resulting specifications are likely to be implemented in major browsers. Membership in this organization is much more open, there are no fees and in many ways it is much more of a grassroots movement focused on innovation.
Alex characterized ajax toolkits as “symbiotic parasites”, which have continuously pushed the bar of web evolution in terms of what can be done with what we have. This certainly rings true given the existence of ~ 200 ajax toolkits out there. There are efforts to try and bring this ecosystem of toolkits closer together through the work of the Open Ajax Alliance and to me that’s a welcome development bringing many players to the table but what remains is a lack of progress in the underlying capabilities of HTML, DOM, and CSS. Who knows maybe WHATWG will bring about much needed innovation.