Webware

After leaving much of the creation of a new version of HTML to Apple, Google, Opera, and Mozilla, Microsoft has begun sinking its teeth into the Web standard.

The move adds clout to the effort to renovate HyperText Markup Language, the standard used to describe Web pages, which last was formally updated in 1999. In a mailing list posting on Friday, the software giant offered a host of questions and concerns with the present proposal.

"As part of our planning for future work, the IE team is reviewing the current editor's draft of the HTML5 spec and gathering our thoughts. We want to share our feedback and discuss this in the working group," said Internet Explorer Program Manager Adrian Bateman in the message. "I will post our notes as we collect them so we can iterate on our thinking more quickly. At this stage we have more questions than answers, but I believe that discussing them in public is the best way to make progress."

HTML 5 in its current draft form includes a number of significant advancements, notably several that make the Web a better foundation for applications, not just static Web pages. Among the present HTML 5 features are built-in video and audio, the ability to store data on a local computer to enable use of Web applications even when offline, Web Workers that can perform computational chores in the background without bogging down Web application responsiveness, Canvas for creating sophisticated two-dimensional graphics, and drag-and-drop for better Web application user interfaces.

XHTML 2, we hardly knew you.

XHTML 2, a technology intended to build a more powerful Web from the ground up, met a quiet end last week, spotlighting the difficulties of standardization in a fast-moving Internet. Introduced in 2002, XHTML 2 was a centerpiece of standards work at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

But incompatibility with the existing Web and a direction at odds with Web developers' desires doomed it to a slow demise. On Thursday, after a long reconciliation with browser makers who'd struck off in a different direction, the W3C announced that it will wind down development of XHTML 2 this year.

Ultimately, Web browser makers had the upper hand in charting the Web's future.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Instead, the group will channel those resources into standardizing what the browser makers have been toiling on all these years: HTML 5, a sprawling collection of new features to improve the present Hypertext Markup Language. Although elements of XHTML 2 will live on in HTML 5, overall, the browser makers prevailed.

"XHTML 2 was a beautiful specification of philosophical purity that had absolutely no resemblance to the real world," said Bruce Lawson, HTML 5 evangelist for browser maker Opera.

So what went wrong? In short, the Web has many masters, but the ones with final say over its nature are those who build it page by page, not the standards group trying to create a new foundation.

XHTML 2 was designed to reform the Web as a medium for publishing documents, but the developers--and the browser makers who listened closely to those developers--instead wanted a platform for interactive applications. And while that direction prevailed, its incarnation in HTML 5 faces its own set of challenges now.

The consensus for HTML 5 support has been building for years, and the W3C already had been increasing its involvement in its standardization well before it decided to put an end to much of the competing XHTML 2 standard. Although the HTML-XHTML split has been fractious at times, there's inescapable tension between standards groups trying to chart the future and vendors whose products relate to those standards.

"I will not say it's been the smoothest way of doing things, but it's not an unnatural way for things to proceed," said Mike Smith, leader of HTML work at W3C, speaking of the reconciliation process that rejuvenated the W3C's HTML work. "Vendors are the ones who drive innovation on the Web for the most part."

Why XHTML?
So if it's so clear today that HTML 5 is the way to go, why was so much energy, time, and research invested in XHTML 2? It was an attempt start afresh without HTML's shortcomings.

The X in XHTML stands for XML, which in turn stands for Extensible Markup Language. XML is a broad technology that uses a strict set of tags to label different types of content in a document, and XHTML was engineered specifically for the Web. XHTML brought rigor to the loosey-goosey and slap-dash world of HTML, and it would have permitted developers to employ a broader range of computing engines called parsers to digest and process the XML, Smith said.

XHTML "was a cleaner and better-architected version of HTML," Smith said. And in its earlier years, it had support. "At the time when XHTML 2 was first conceived and specified in the early drafts, most everybody thought it was a good idea. A lot of people in hindsight want to look back at it now and make the claim that they knew it wasn't going to have success," Smith said.

XHTML 2.0 made it to working draft stage, but only parts of the specification will live on in HTML 5.

One example of its utility is the tight coupling of textual information with a graphs encoded with the SVG, or Scalable Vector Graphics format, Smith said. Another advantage was better browsing with the limited abilities of mobile phones.

One of the big problems with XHTML 2 was that it wasn't backwards compatible, though. Not only could it not be used to display existing Web pages, but Web browsers had to be expanded with an entirely new engine for handling the XML. Notably, Microsoft's Internet Explorer, the dominant browser by far, couldn't handle XHTML on its own.

Another problem was that there was plenty of demand for improvements to HTML, which W3C had declared finished with version 4.01 in 1999.

"People were so focused on XHTML 2 that they were substantially less interested in modifying the application model and introducing new features to HTML that developers were clamoring for," said Arun Ranganathan, standards evangelist for Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox browser. "We felt the standards going on at the time...were disconnected from a large majority of developers.

Microsoft agrees with its browser rival.

"We've never heard a strong request from our developer audience and customers for XHTML 2," said Amy Barzdukas, general manager for IE.

Enter WHATWG
One crucial moment came five years ago when Opera and Mozilla representatives showed the W3C an idea called WebForms for improving HTML. "We jointly presented this paper to W3C, who rejected it," Lawson said.

Mozilla's Brendan Eich and Opera's Ian Hickson were displeased with how things went. "The best way to help the Web is to incrementally improve the existing web standards," concluded Eich, founder of the JavaScript Web programming language, after the meeting in a blog post.

Eich also announced there an Opera and Mozilla plan to take that evolutionary route. They launched an open e-mail list called WHATWG, short for Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group. Apple, which offers its own Safari browser, soon began participating, too.

"It became a de facto standards organization without the formality of W3C. It's where we went to figure out what the future of the Web was," Ranganathan said.

Eventually, the Web-application direction won over the W3C. "Some things are clearer with hindsight of several years. It is necessary to evolve HTML incrementally," said Web founder and W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee said in 2006.

But Berners-Lee at the time also maintained the commitment to the "well-formed," more rigorous XML-based future: "It is important to maintain HTML incrementally, as well as continuing a transition to well-formed world, and developing more power in that world."

In practice, the W3C world and WHATWG world involve many of the same people. That probably eased the reconciliation to the current state, where WHATWG and W3C operate simultaneously, the first more informal and the second with more careful handling of intellectual property concerns.

Ultimately, HTML carried the day. What began with interest in more sophisticated Web sites such as eBay blossomed with the arrival of Ajax, which used JavaScript to build more sophisticated Web-based applications. And Web applications weren't just theoretical ideas.

"When Gmail and Google Maps and Ajax came along, it became really clear we needed a new set of technologies that made it easier to make those kinds of applications," Smith said.

The transition culminated with W3C's bare-bones news last week: "Today the director announces that when the XHTML 2 Working Group charter expires as scheduled at the end of 2009, the charter will not be renewed. By doing so, and by increasing resources in the HTML Working Group, W3C hopes to accelerate the progress of HTML 5 and clarify W3C's position regarding the future of HTML."

Some features of XHTML 2 will be built into HTML 5, so the XHTML 2 work won't have been for naught, assuming a critical mass of browser makers do in fact include the necessary XML parser along the HTML parser.

HTML 5: no walk in the park
Though the W3C-WHATWG dust has mostly settled, the standard is far from finished, and indeed looks a long way off.

The present approach involves a give and take between browser makers trying out new features and the standards group codifying them. Features can't make it to the ultimate W3C state, "final recommendation," until at least two browsers support the feature compatibly, Smith said.

In practice, that means adventurous Web developers who choose to support the new technologies in effect are blessing them even though the technology might well change.

HTML 5 elements came from all over. Canvas, which involves two-dimensional graphics, began at Apple's Safari and now has won over Opera, Firefox, and Google's Chrome. ContentEditable, which lets Web pages be edited in place, came from Microsoft. Google now is working on a faster communication feature called Web Sockets. Programmers for WebKit, the open-source project underlying Safari, are developing DataGrid, which brings spreadsheet-like tables with sorting and editing to Web pages.

"The speed of the web is continuing to pick up in general," Barzdukas said. HTML 5 feature support figures prominently in the browser sales pitches from Google and from Mozilla, with its "upgrade the Web" tag line for Firefox 3.5.

Actual standardization, though, remains distant. Mozilla's Ranganathan hopes for drafts of some HTML 5 elements this year and a draft of the full specification in 2010.

The HTML 5 built-in video situation is illustrative. Hickson, the HTML 5 editor and now Google employee, posted a lament about HTML 5 video last week because browser makers don't agree on whether to support the patent-free Ogg Theora format, preferred by Opera and Mozilla, or the commercially popular H.264 format, preferred by Google and Apple. The upshot for now: HTML 5 is trying to standardize video but doesn't specify which format to be used.

That pace of HTML 5 standardization important, given the importance Microsoft places on supporting actual standards and the company's commanding market share.

"The support of ratified standards (that Web developers) can use is something that we are extremely supportive of," Barzdukas said. "In some cases, it can be premature to start claiming support for standards that are not yet in fact standards."

Jon von Tetzchner is the chief executive of the Norwegian browser company Opera. (Download for Windows and Mac.) Although Opera first became known for its desktop product, the company has also become well known for its Opera Mini handset-based Web browser.

Opera has become heavily involved in the development of standards for widgets--the lightweight, Web-based applications that are starting to become prevalent on new handsets. It has also been working hard on the development of HTML 5, which has more built-in rich media functionality than the current version of the Web standard.

ZDNet UK caught up with von Tetzchner at the Wireless '09 event in London on Wednesday to discuss standards processes and how Flash may soon become unnecessary.

Jon von Tetzchner

(Credit: ZDNet UK)

Q: Tell us about the work Opera has been doing with widget standards.
Von Tetzchner: We work mostly through the W3C, which is where the widget standard per se is being worked on. The widget standard (as far as it has been established) is more about the packaging--on the relation of how you connect to the underlying device, it hasn't been standardized fully. Bondi is trying to standardize that, and we have engaged with Bondi and with (the Joint Innovation Labs). (Editors' note: Bondi is a Web/widget specification endorsed by the LiMo Foundation.)

There are already quite a few initiatives, and there is a risk of fragmentation, and obviously our goal is always to try to make things migrate...to a single standard. Sometimes, on the way, people are eager to get started, but we try to engage as much as possible to make sure that this gets standardized in a way that works for everyone.

What does Opera gain from these widget standards bodies?
Von Tetzchner: I don't want to say this is a philosophical thing for us, but we do believe the Internet is too important to be limited. There is a significant risk of the fragmentation of technology. It'll be like on the PC: you'll write an application for a platform, and it will only run on that platform. We're already seeing some of this (in widget development), where Web technologies may be in the mix. But you're mixing all those things in, and suddenly you have to write for the platform instead of for the technology.

Our goal is to try and make this work because we believe that's the right thing to do. We've seen the benefits of this from the PC side, where there are differences between the different operating systems, but you can still run all the applications. That's the benefit of having things standardized.

We have a lot of people that know how to write standards, how to implement standards and how to engage in the standards bodies. We have the biggest active group in the W3C to do just that. Considering that our competitors tend to be a lot bigger than us, that shows our commitment to this.

The average person likely won't even notice, but Webmasters can rejoice that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have banded together to support an unofficial standard for steering search engines in the right direction.

All three on Thursday announced they'd support a technique by which a little extra code in a Web page can indicate the address of its "canonical" version--essentially, the original, primary URL. The move will make it easier to tell search engines what they should pay attention to and to avoid treating duplicative Web pages as different.

Today, the search engine bots that scour the Web for pages to index don't have any particular way to know whether they should be pointing to a "http://www.somepage.com/index.html" or "http://www.somepage.com/index.html?lang=en"--the latter with an optional extra tidbit at the end that indicates the Web server should show the English-language version of a page. The new canonical tag can steer search engines toward the desired primary page, which in this example might ease browsing for non-English speakers.

In all likelihood, most people won't notice much of a difference. Perhaps that the URLs in search results on which they click will be a bit shorter, and perhaps that search engines won't be cluttered with repeats of the same pages in search results.

But the bigger benefits are for Web site operators, which can ensure a more consistent experience for people using their sites and cleaner data collected about how people use their sites, and for the search engines themselves, which won't have to make as many guesses about the pecking order of similar pages.

Also notable is that Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo are cooperating. Standards aren't always easy to hammer out, even informal ones such as this. Supporting canonical tags, though, probably won't mean give any search engine any new advantage or disadvantage, so this was probably relatively easy to create.

Now if the companies could only join forces better on e-mail identity authentication and instant-message interoperability, the world would actually look better for the average person, too.

Facebook has joined the board of the OpenID Foundation and will host an OpenID Design Summit later this month, according to a post on the social network's developer blog.

This is a bit of a surprise because Facebook has developed its own universal log-in standard, Facebook Connect, which theoretically competes with the nonprofit OpenID standard. It should be noted that Facebook has not yet announced any official plans to make the two compatible, and that just joining the board and hosting an event might not quell the criticism from open-source advocates who say Facebook is still too proprietary in its nature.

Engineer Luke Shepard will be Facebook's representative on the OpenID Foundation board, a corresponding post on the OpenID blog explained, adding that Shepard has been "a huge internal advocate for OpenID" at Facebook. The board also consists of members from Google, IBM, Microsoft, PayPal, VeriSign, and Yahoo as well as seven elected "community" members. Many of the corporate board members joined about a year ago; OpenID creator Brad Fitzpatrick is now employed by Google and has helped to build its OpenSocial developer platform standard.

"Given the popularity and positive user experience of Facebook Connect, we look forward to Facebook working within the community to improve OpenID's usability and reach," the post by David Recordon and Chris Messina read.

Facebook's blog post, written by engineering VP Mike Schroepfer, expressed similar goals. "It is our hope that we can take the success of Facebook Connect and work together with the community to build easy-to-use, safe, open and secure distributed identity frameworks for use across the Web," Schroepfer wrote.

Facebook made a significant portion of its developer platform code open-source last summer.

As part of the Le Web conference in Paris, News Corp.'s MySpace announced that it has taken a deeper plunge into the data portability pool.

The social network has announced its support for Google Friend Connect, which launched in full last week, and is using the standard to help power a new set of tools called the MySpace Open Platform. In conjunction, MySpace has ditched the distinctly unsexy moniker of "Data Availability" in favor of the new sobriquet "MySpaceID" for its universal log-in project. The Open Platform, in addition to MySpaceID, encompasses its OpenSocial-compatible app platform and the Post To MySpace sharing feature.

Right now, with MySpaceID, members can log in to partner sites with their MySpace usernames and find which of their MySpace friends use those partner sites. In the future, it'll also synchronize feed activity much like the rival Facebook Connect and allow MySpace members to register for third-party site accounts with their MySpace URLs.

Along with Google Friend Connect, MySpaceID was built with open standards OAuth, OpenSocial, and OpenID. MySpace, as well as Google, is one of the founding partners of the OpenSocial Foundation.

MySpace also announced the first two partners for MySpaceID: European mobile giant Vodafone and personalized home page service Netvibes. It still hasn't yet rolled out log-in credentials for the original Data Availability launch partners--Twitter, eBay, and Yahoo--but product manager Max Engel says those are still in the works.

Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect both launched last week, spurring a return to the social-networking turf wars and power struggle for control of the almighty "social graph."

With all the buzz about Facebook Connect this week, it's worth asking the question: Whatever happened to OpenID?

The universal log-in standard was created in 2005 by Brad Fitzpatrick, founder of LiveJournal, while he was working at blog software company Six Apart. (Fitzpatrick now works at Google; Six Apart has since sold LiveJournal.) It has the support of Yahoo, MySpace (which just helped build an OpenID extension for the Flock browser), and President-elect Barack Obama's Change.gov. Even Google has dipped its proverbial toe in the pool.

But it wasn't until Facebook Connect started making headlines that the concept of data portability--a single log-in across multiple sites--made the jump from the tech press to the mainstream media. OpenID, some speculated, had been left behind in the dust.

Hardly. But Wired's Michael Calore hit the nail on the head on Monday: "Presenting a dialog that asks a user to log in to one Web site using a name and password from another Web site is jarring, but Facebook has managed to keep Facebook Connect simple enough for everyday users to understand. Such ease of use virtually guarantees it will win support quickly."

The truth is, the future of the "social Web" is in expansion. And expansion invariably involves dealing with a crowd beyond the Twittering, FriendFeeding, WordPressing geeks who actually understand the concept behind data portability.

And that's not made any easier by the fact that OpenID calls itself "an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity." Try bringing that up in the boardroom of a non-tech company looking to ride the social-networking wave. Then tell them that the most buzzed-about social network on the planet will power your site's social features. The decision will probably fall in the Facebook camp, unfortunately for the open-standards crowd and its admirable dedication to all things balanced and democratic.

"Nobody should own this. Nobody's planning on making any money from this," Fitzpatrick has said about OpenID. "The goal is to release every part of this under the most liberal licenses possible, so there's no money or licensing or registering required to play. It benefits the community as a whole if something like this exists, and we're all a part of the community."

But your average company is probably going to care more about profit margins than OpenID's decentralized ideal, and the possibility of having its user activity broadcast across Facebook members' news feeds is tantalizing. Especially during tough financial times, strategy will likely trump idealism.

That said, there are some good signs for OpenID. It has a ton of support in the tech world, and if Facebook Connect's impending expansion goes awry for any reason--think Beacon--it could open up a whole new set of doors for OpenID. What it (and other open Web standards) needs either way is some image repair.

"Facebook is trying to replace all log-ins with their own, and control the creation, distribution, and application of the social graph using their proprietary platform," Chris Saad, whose DataPortability Workgroup has put its support behind OpenID and other open Web standards, wrote in a blog post. "The most scary part of this, is that while Facebook is quietly and methodically building out this vision with massive partners, the standards community is busy squabbling about naming the open alternative."

OpenID and its brethren could use a good, simplified marketing pitch, not to mention some announcements and partnerships that are more prominent than an extension for a niche Web browser. They need to use the resources that the likes of MySpace and Yahoo can provide to get more deals going and start making headlines outside of ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch.

And most importantly, in a recession, "it's good for the Web, so it's good for everyone" just isn't concrete enough. One last tip for OpenID: Start talking business benefits.

There's a new OpenID extension for "social browser" Flock, and it was created with the help of password management service Vidoop and News Corp.-owned social network MySpace.

It's now available for download for all Flock users who have upgraded to Flock 2.0. For MySpace, which initially announced its support for OpenID back in July, this is also a push for Data Availability, a universal-login project that the social network announced in May but has since only rolled out with a few partners.

Yahoo, one of MySpace's launch partners for Data Availability, has also thrown its weight behind OpenID.

"As three companies dedicated to empowering users to easily share content and experiences, this was a very rewarding--and relatively fast--collaboration," Max Engel, MySpace's Data Availability product manager, said in a release. "Our goal was to eliminate some of the work involved in jumping between social experiences on the Web so that people can focus on their connections and the incredible content that's out there. This Flock extension will give millions of people an easier way to expand their experiences and expression without boundaries."

The OpenID Flock extension allows for easier credential management within the browser and makes it more apparent when a site will accept an OpenID login. A handful of OpenID extensions already exist for the open-source Flock, but this one's got the seal of approval from some big names.

There are deeper reasons for MySpace being so vocal about OpenID support, though. The standard has seen its toughest rival yet in the form of Facebook Connect, a data-portability project which enjoyed a high-profile New York Times writeup this week and will reportedly be ready for a full debut very soon. (It's already been implemented on a number of sites.)

Flock, unfortunately, isn't an enormous player in the browser space. It has tons of bells and whistles, but is still well behind the likes of Internet Explorer and Firefox in terms of downloads, and has newfound competition from Google's Chrome.

Regardless, MySpace has been paying a lot of lip service to open standards recently, and it's always good to see real developments.

Gather, a niche social network that caters to adults looking for in-depth online discussions, is at the center of the formation of a new ad industry group dedicated to developing standards for social-media advertising.

(Credit: Social Media Advertising Council)

Called the Social Media Advertising Council, or SMAC, the group encompasses representatives of social networks, ad agencies, and eventually brand advertisers; inaugural members come from the leadership of agencies Universal McCann, MediaVest, Edelman, Deep Focus, and Digitas, among others.

That roster is far from complete, SMAC chairman and Gather CEO Tom Gerace told CNET News in a meeting at the Web 2.0 Expo at the Jacob Javits Convention Center on Wednesday.

"We've invited Facebook and MySpace, of course, on the social-media side," Gerace said. "We're reaching out to additional agencies--and now to brand advertisers, for the first time--to invite them to be part of the consortium." He added that SMAC will have its first meeting in late October.

SMAC's aim is to create a set of standards for social-media advertising, sometimes called "engagement advertising," that mirrors the standards set for print, television, and display ads.

"People go out, and they mean 20 different things when they say 'engagement,'" Gerace said. "We need to have a standard vocabulary, a common vocabulary. We need to have standard methods of measurements, and we need to have a standard buying unit where people can come in and transact much more easily in the space, and buy 'engagement.'"

Gerace said neither he nor anyone else has decided what "buying engagement" actually means. He hopes SMAC, set up as a nonprofit organization, will change that. "When we talk about a standard buying unit, maybe we've got flexibility built in, based on the reach achieved," he suggested.

Statistics from eMarketer say social-network advertising is projected to be a $1.8 billion business in 2009. But Gerace said that without a standards board that fulfills a role like the one that the Interactive Advertising Bureau does for display ads, its growth will be hindered.

"The industry has done great as a nascent space in talking about engagement, but without these standards, we can't take it to the next level."

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