Microsoft joins HTML 5 standard fray in earnest
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.
The formal HTML standard is under the governance of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and Microsoft's Chris Wilson is a co-chairman of the W3C group developing HTML. But much of the course of HTML 5 has been set so far outside that by a separate effort called the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG), which browser makers launched years ago when they didn't like the XHTML 2.0 direction the W3C was trying to take HTML.
Microsoft hasn't been uninvolved in HTML 5. It's the origin of technology in HTML 5 called ContentEditable, which lets elements of Web pages be edited in place by people using a browser. And Microsoft said its newest browser, Internet Explorer 8, also supports these HTML 5 components: the DOM Store, Cross Document Messaging, Cross Domain Messaging, and Ajax Navigation.
But the new message indicates Microsoft is getting serious about the effort, digging into many nitty-gritty aspects of the proposed specification. That's important because Microsoft has of late embraced a standard-centric philosophy when it comes to what technology IE supports, and IE is of course the dominant browser on the market.
Microsoft declined to comment for this story.
Google, Apple, and Mozilla have been trumpeting HTML 5 features in their latest browsers, but Microsoft takes a more cautious tone.
"The support of ratified standards (that Web developers) can use is something that we are extremely supportive of," said Amy Barzdukas, general manager for IE, in a July interview. "In some cases, it can be premature to start claiming support for standards that are not yet in fact standards."
Stephen Shankland writes about a wide range of technology and products, but has a particular focus on browsers and digital photography. He joined CNET News in 1998 and since then also has covered Google, Yahoo, servers, supercomputing, Linux and open-source software, and science. E-mail Stephen, or follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/stshank. 
They also have a monopoly in IE and don't HAVE to improve their products quickly anymore. They are fat and lazy and take users for granted as long as they can dictate the technology and thereby lock people in to it. They are not open at all.
Only if you use THEIR suite of products.
Amen
As for the comment about java, it turned out well because .net is good stuff.
Acid3: http://acid3.acidtests.org/
SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark: http://www2.webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider.html
The SunSpider test, for example, shows Chrome 3.0 executing JavaScript roughly 10x faster than IE. How long will it take for companies to realize that 10x longer for say 10,000 employees starts to add up to a significant loss in productivity?
Companies may also want to simplify their internal websites, by implementing them with HTML5. Unless Microsoft speeds up HTML5 support in IE, these companies will have no choice but to use alternative browsers (Firefox, Chrome, etc.) that support significantly more HTML5 functionality.
Now tell me how many companies use Javascript?
...tell that to way too many boneheaded corporate IT departments, and to way too many incompetent programmers whose products won't support anything but IE (version 6, even).
Barely any, considering they all end up forcing ActiveX on their users because they are too cheap to upgrade from a technology ABANDONED by its creator.
They should at least sandbox an alternative browser for use outside of LAN work, at least then the chance of a virus is significantly lower, IE6 has holes all over the place.
And it is these companies who we entrust our finances to.
Just a tip, never do work with any site that requires ActiveX, if your bank does, i would change for your sake, in fact anything to do with personal information, just don't touch it, period.
While ActiveX is good from a programming standpoint, it is terrible, security-wise, especially in the default setup.
IE7 was MSFT waking up to the browser wars. They embraced standards and made a better browser than FF in one go. For it, they had a large majority of their userbase go to other browsers because they felt bad when they saw their page displayed in Compatibility Mode. IE8 is one of the best browsers I've used so far. FF is getting bloated, Chrome uploads your data to Google serves, Safari has some major security flaws, and Opera is just lame. Also slow..
To the idiots that will say you don't have to use it are WRONG! IE is mainly used in the workplace, most stats show it's market share drops considerably as soon as people leave work and go home.
When the next generation takes over the decision making in business IT, lets hope they all ditch IE and change to any of the alternatives.
Mac OS X and Safari are far safer than any other OS and browser.
Why anyone would want to continue to use IE is beyond comprehension.
And the latest version of IE is standards compliant. They're cleaning up there act telling a competitor to go away is never a good thing. Anyone with half a brain will tell you that.
They lose their grip on their only 2 cash cows, which incidentally at least one is an illegal monopoly.
The last thing MS wants is browser and platform independent web apps. When that happens they are dead.
Windows is not an illegal monopoly.
Striking deals and being cheaper than the competition is not illegal thats all they did.
The thing is that this was only to make it easier on the consumer.
And looking at FF's marketshare the damage is being repaired quite quickly.
Amen
And what about Safari being integrated into OSX? So if Apple gets on a roll and increases market share, do we at some point arbitrarily decide OSX is getting too much market share and have Apple rip out Safari.
Ridiculous.
It's incredibly funny to hear you say FF is a bloated crashing pig.
I was at a neighbors place yesterday for close to 8 hours cleaning up her machine (running Windows XP).
After cleaning up the machine, replacing her AV with one that actually works, replacing any other app with a better one and setting her up with an easy to use, faster working defrag to encourage more system maintenance, the only thing left was IE.
It was running slowly so I checked it. I was guessing it was IE 6 since she doesn't know that much about computers in general. Turns out she was using IE 8 (the latest and "greatest" from MS).
Her homepage is yahoo. I double clicked IE on the desktop and waited.......and waited...........and waited. After 5 minutes (not an exaggeration) IE finally showed, yahoo didn't show for another full minute. That's after her machine was defragged and cleaned of any malware, viruses, crap programs and even after it was restarted.
I gave IE a chance on her machine then decided I'd try FF on it. I downloaded and installed FF 3.5 (latest and greatest from Mozilla) and tried it out. I've used FF 3.5 on my own machine so I knew what to expect. Just like I thought, it was open and on yahoo in less than 10 seconds (slowest time).
I made sure my neighbor could use all the programs I installed to keep her machine in tip top shape then decided, just for fun, to give IE 8 and FF 3.5 a race. Just so you can't say I gave FF an advantage, I had the machine optimized for IE and I gave IE a head start. I double clicked IE, waited 2 full seconds then double clicked FF. I even made a mistake and started two instances of FF to one instance of IE. Both instances of FF were up and on the homepage and IE never showed up.
I left IE as a back up but my neighbor has already said she'll be using FF from now on. Make all the claims you want. Experience shows otherwise.
Easier for the Windows consumer, yes, but at the expense of users of other OSs. The idea of IE was to make the Web something that could only be fully experienced on Windows. From the decision that judged Microsoft to be a predatory monopoly in clear violation of the law:
"As has been shown, Microsoft also engaged in a concerted series of actions designed to protect the applications barrier to entry, and hence its monopoly power, from a variety of middleware threats, including Netscape's Web browser and Sun's implementation of Java. Many of these actions have harmed consumers in ways that are immediate and easily discernible. They have also caused less direct, but nevertheless serious and far-reaching, consumer harm by distorting competition."
I switched a neighbor off of IE 8 due to excessive slowness. Hers never crashed either but that's mainly because it was so slow she could only view 10 pages a day at best.
I switched her to FF 3.5 and the difference was night and day. Web pages were open within seconds that were taking a full minute in IE8. Even just starting up, Firefox was faster than IE 8 with the same home page.
I'll even give you the benefit of the doubt (though I know different) and say, theoretically, that Firefox will crash an average of one time per 20 web pages to zero crashes for IE (now you know it's theoretical). If Firefox renders pages than much more quickly than IE, most people will take the crashes over the slowness any day of the week.
on my intel Core7 desktop: IE opens fast and not a single crash yet. This desktop has no 3rd party software installed :) ;except an online game.
Just listen to yourself. Your claims that it takes IE minutes to open a page for your neighbor or that they can only view 10 pages a day is rediculous. It just shows everyone here how biased you are and blantantly hateful towards Microsoft you are. Get a life buddy.
I currently have 49 tabs open across 10 windows in FF 3.0.13 plus AdBock Pro, Greasemonkey, FoxyProxy, Veoh, Skype and Xmarks. I could never get IE7 (with IE7 Pro) to open even half that without going funny (toolbars/menus disappearing) and I can't be bothered to try it in IE8 because I'm happy with what I'm using.
There's a little instability, crashes about once a week.
IE sucks, but it doesn't take a minute to open a webpage
Now, I just created a separate FF profile. IE sucks.
Why not a cool Zune player for Android? Blackberry? WebOS? Symbian?
Why not Microsoft Office for Linux?
As the smartphone app stores have demonstrated, people will pay for apps/services that they consider valuable.
Free your creative talent, Microsoft. Perhaps you will suffer in the short term, but in the long term, I think your people will deliver value and revenue.
Microsoft was a software company once but, they have not been in some time.
They do support Blackberry (Live Search app) and have iPhone (Seadragon Mobile) and they have Office for Mac. Can you say that for other companies? Any Apple software on Blackberry? iTunes on Android? Any Apple app on Windows Mobile? On Linux? Linux has Moonlight (Silverlight mono version).
The point is you can't just develop open source version of products if you think you won't make money out of it. Microsoft like Google, Apple, HP, Intel and everyone else in the industry is a *business* and has a responsibility to their shareholders and partners.
TheReaperD: how is Microsoft a patent / copyright company? They don't make a ton of money by licensing patented technologies. They make money from building and selling software. Which company would you consider a "software company"?
RMarch - there are a lot of "valid business models" that fail. Oh yeah, integrating Zune player into iTunes... doesn't make sense. MS Office in iTunes?
By the way, it's said that Office 2010 will support Firefox so it will be available everywhere...
Wow. Where have you been man?
1. Apple won't license OSX. You're correct. Apple's main business is to sell hardware. The OS adds essential value to the hardware. If Apple let it run on anything then their primary business would suffer tremendously. You fault them for that?
2. They strictly close off development for the iPhone. This couldn't be farther from the truth. Anyone with $100 can develop for the iPhone, and Apple GIVES you all the development tools you need. They even provide a place to sell your software at about cost to them.
3. You cant use anything other then Itunes on an Ipod. (BTW, it's iTunes, not Itunes.) There are many apps that work with an iPod. Just because Apple has made it so slick with iTunes doesn't stop anyone from making their own version of iTunes and going to market.
4. "...companies do the exact same thing." Really? What other company has taken a standard such as HTML or Java and "enhanced it" to the point that it only works with their own implementation? That's the kind of dirty pool Microsoft has always played (and if you read the transcripts of their last trial you'll see proof of this right from the horse's mouth) , and I challenge you to provide an example of where Apple did the same.
...and keep it locked a version behind the Windows one.
"They don't make a ton of money by licensing patented technologies"
...are you saying there are no patents in either Windows or Office? When did that happen?
Tell you what: when I see Microsoft Office for Linux, or a Mac Office version taht doesn't constantly lag one version behind the Windows one? Then we're getting somewhere. Until then, it's all fluff...
You can't tell me that Apple makes quality versions of their software for Windows either.
Just look at Safari, iTunes, and QuickTime.
PS: Your claims of "quality" are about as credible as most of your claims on these boards... practically nil.
Sure but is it quality?
Last time I checked Safari could eat half a gig doing nothing.
And both Safari and iTunes feel sluggish
Mono is a project receives some funding from Microsoft but feature-set it not controlled by Microsoft.
Web-base Office 10 will be on-par on all platforms since it's a web-app, just as Silverlight is.
Yes, there is no question that Office Mac are a version or two older than their Windows counterparts. But don't tell me that it's a "fluff". It's still very significant. Not for Microsoft but for Apple...
Remember that 150M investment Microsoft made on Apple? A major part of that agreement was a pledge by Microsoft to keep selling and developing Office for Mac. At that moment Apple was at the brink of extinction and Microsoft didn't have much incentive to keep developing for the Mac.
http://www.apple.com/ca/press/1997/08/AppleMicrosoft.html
Google came up with a good chunk of the functionality in HTML5 (Gears)
Hell, Microsoft came up with one of the functionalities of JavaScript that powers all these AJAX sites you see, including Google who use it AGAINST them with things like Docs, Gmail, etc. (XMLHTTPRequest)
And the above functionality was actually one of the more successful pieces of code from ActiveX. (well, the MSXML library to be precise)
Standards aren't just made up on the spot in HTML, they are (eventually) built up by others, usually via plugins like Gears, O3D, Flash, etc
Others are usually from methods employed by developers on the web, such as the recent header and footer tags, aside, etc, it is much better than doing something like <div id="header">, now it is just <header>, and saves some extra bytes. (which is still important in terms of the server and bandwidth use, until the internet backbones get an overhaul, then it won't matter much)
Very rarely have new "standards" been created without it being done by others first, not just in web dev, but generally everywhere.
And most people do use this as a tactic to cut their costs in research, but might end up paying in terms of licence fees to use said research in whatever way it emerges. (but here, it won't be a problem)
Look at O3D and WebGL (just recent) and Quake Live, sooner or later, there will probably be a standard for 3D graphics on the web
It is a shame VRML never took off, i liked it.
As for the 3 Es (well, 2 Es, there won't be a 3rd E this time), i don't think they will try to pull anything this time.
They are already being stalked by lawyers for anti-competitive practices and such.
Unless Microsoft really do something amazing with HTML5 that makes web devs cream their pants, i doubt many people would take up anything they added considering the share of IE is slowly falling.
Buckling your site for IE users isn't required as much these days, these happy days :)
Microsoft and open standards are at opposite ends.
You couldn't get any further apart than those 2 examples.
Day - Night
Good - Evil
Love - Hate
Open standards - Microsoft.
Do you have anything to support your arguments?
OOXML
DirectX
SMB
C#
MS Java
XPS
I could go on all day.
HTML5 might be close to prime time in 2-3 years. Of course MS will implement it slightly differently from FF and Chrome will be different from Opera, etc, etc. Not huge differences - just enough to make coding to it a freaking nightmare. Like DHTML has always been.
Thankfully, Flash will continue to evolve and will stay light years ahead of anything DHTML can do. It will continue to work the same cross-browser and cross-platform. And it will continue to show the way to the promise of the Internet.
I can't help but notice, though, that Gmail is written in JavaScript and the iPhone doesn't have Flash support. So Adobe has work to do to maintain its position of strength.
I think you'll find one of the reasons that web standards have been held back is by companies joining in the standardisation process to ensure that their particular little corner of the internet is not reclaimed for all of us.
Adobe, MS and Apple all have too much to loose from web standards progressing - this is why they joined in helping the standards evolve.
How do you expect anyone to support a standard thats not even finalized?
I've seen so many pathetic excuses thrown in to prevent other standards developing it should be a masochistic pleasure to see what they get up to here.
If they really wanted to help develop HTML why did they not add canvas support to IE8?
dude, u don't even have to explain... 'monkeyfun14' is just messing. isn't he?
as for the monopoly thing... MSFT Windows IS a monopoly... but a legal one (in a sense, don't be replying about the fact that it shouldn't be one... that is the judgment the govt made.) Their bundling I.E. was made to totally get rid of Netscape....
the interesting twist today is that MSFT doesn't have an easy way of hiding away competition. The whole argument about Apple bundling Safari doesnt hold merit (because they are NOT an illegal monopoly).
All i know is MSFT wary of Google's OS... remember how Netscape tried to be the face of the net? Google is trying to do the same... and has $ & the cool factor to grab attention. whether the OS will be any more useful or efficient is another story.
MSFT probably should look out for the Apple Trojan... OS X lite hiding under iPhone OS. Did you notice the volume of independent & corporate developers jumping on this cash cow being added daily? This was how Windows ultimately ruled the desktop PC and a little pressure on the OEMs. Anyway, the future of computing will be mobile... and Apple has gotten a head start on the whole package. Andoid may be the only thing keeping Apple from becoming a monopoly in the smart phone/mobile computing space.
Natal is still too niche... and are you going to be waving/moving your body to make a phone call? send a simple text(maybe)? that's where advances in voice recognition come in... again Google is trying to grab this and implement it across their various services... despite their not being the creators of the technology, but rather finding a way to make it practical/useful (ala Apple.)
So, the gov't looking into Apple & Google... maybe has some validity...
I sure would rather have Apple & Google than MSFT everything...
competition is always good.
All dismal failures due to the fact that the API monkeys at M$ can't write code beyond the CS101 level. But hey, maybe if they rebrand it and pour a bunch of money into advertising, maybe then some people will be suckered into trying it again. If that trick works, then they can claim it's a success because of all the market share they've captured in their first month.
Suckers.
my point was that M$ always playing catch up. When they see their market share threaten. They suddenly get on board.
in other words: If it wasn't for alternative browsers like Firefox and Opera, M$ will still be IE without Tabs.
Then FF must of been playing catch up too because Opera has had tabs before them.
And actually IE was one of the first to start a decent tab system instead of using ALT-T or going into File to get a new tab.
Although I do most of my browsing with Safari on my MacBook Pro, I don't mind seeing the Firefox message. About 99.44% of the time, the site looks/works just fine in Safari as well.
That's a benefit of standards-compliant browsers.
Yes, for the loud minority who takes every opportunity to take a swipe at Microsoft but does not really have any strong opinion on the topic or haven't taken the time to do some thinking on it.
Those kinds of remarks are not productive and doesn't really contribute anything to the discussion: "okay, okay, we get it, you hate Microsoft.. Now, are you going to tell us why? And how is that relevant to this article?"
An opinion that's based on personal bias or "feelings" isn't worth much... not even the proverbial 2cents...
BTW, did anyone notice how IE8's font rendering is worse than any other browser? At least on my computer....
"The support of ratified standards (that Web developers) can use is something that we are extremely supportive of," said Amy Barzdukas, general manager for IE, in a July interview. "In some cases, it can be premature to start claiming support for standards that are not yet in fact standards."
HTML5 is not even finalized yet so how is it a standard?
When I see this the impression I get is that either the site coders 1) does not really care enough about their users to code well or use cross browser capabilities like Flash 2) do not know how to code websites for compatibilty or 3) are just arrogant or 4) lazy. Or maybe all four. I usually figure the site ************ and stabiltiy is probably a mess in terms of design or function and just move on. And I have three browsers I could use. One of them FF. Yes, it would be great if all users used the just released thing based on probable future unradified standards. But users are users and they have always had a mix of browsers from the last 5-8 years. If you want to produce a website that caters to a certain sliver of them, that is fine of course.
"best in Firefox" messages usually appear on Macs. Many developers don't have time to test and re-test their applications on every browser. That message is more like an excuse for them in case a bug in their code appears in Safari...
If/when Safari reaches beyond 20% or so (just like Firefox), then maybe developers will have more incentive to test or specifically develop against it.
- by Shishant August 9, 2009 5:31 AM PDT
- My suggestion to microsoft, stop developing ie, you guys are too professional to develop :P every new version of ie has its own styling rules, which helps developers to spend their precious time on ***** ie just so that sites looks same as on other browsers.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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- by monkeyfun14 August 9, 2009 8:40 AM PDT
- Uhm actually stay current please IE8 is fully standards compliant.
- Like this
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- by forever4now August 9, 2009 2:52 PM PDT
- @ monkeyfun14
- Like this
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Showing 1 of 2 pages (117 Comments)IE 8 is certainly better than previous versions of IE, but it is still not standards compliant.
Run the Acid3 test below and compare the results to other browsers. IE is dead last.
http://acid3.acidtests.org/