HTML5 's rectification: The game of two institutions and the birth of a standard

The New Yorker magazine recently wrote a brief review of the birth and rectification process of the HTML5 standard. The following is the main content of the article: As you may already know, October 28, the World Wide Web Consortium (hereinafter referred to as "the") formally recommended HTML5. You may also know that this has a certain relationship with the application and the World Wide Web. The question is: does this have anything to do with you?

The answer is, at least in relation to netizens. So, we need to know what HTML5 is and who is controlling it. In addition, it is necessary to know that HTML5 has the various conflicts behind the scenes of the recommendation. Over the next 10 years, billions of people will be using the World Wide Web, but few are really qualified to define the World Wide Web. The company is one such organization. So, what are the members of it? What do they want? Who is sponsoring them?

The birth of the

The World Wide Web has weathered the millennium. Its design was first proposed in 1989, and the distance is now over 25 years. 6 years later, Netscape's IPO (initial public offering) has buckled the nerves of Silicon Valley. When the World Wide Web was new, many computer-savvy people despised it-an extremely primitive technology compared to other hypertext publishing systems. For example, you can link your Web page to any other page, but you don't know when someone is linking to your page. The World Wide Web also does not allow you to edit pages in your browser. This is a very serious flaw for many of the elite thinkers and programmers in the hypertext field.

However, the World Wide Web is easy to set up and learning is very difficult. It has its own set of delivery modes-anyone can read the Web page to learn the HTML language and then look at the underlying HTML code. The World Wide Web is entirely composed of simple text and images that are linked to other equally simple text and images.

The tech industry has always believed in featurism, so people are starting to add everything they can think of to the World Wide Web. How do i show 3D images? How do I make the text glow and even roll over the entire page? How do I turn a webpage into software? Different browsers emerge, each forming their own culture and taking a certain share, including Mosaic, Netscape, IE, Cyberdog, Spyglass, Lynx, and Amaya.

With the increasing complexity of the world Wide Web, this ecosystem has gradually formed the situation of the separatist. At that time, each browser can only render one format of the picture, if I use another format, then when I send you a link to a picture, you will not see the actual effect. If this continues, there will be more than one World Wide Web on the planet today. The state of disorder will follow, and photographers will complain.

As this fragmentation intensifies, it is recognized that an organization is needed to define a common language that encompasses all the necessary functions. After that, the organization must also write a document that contains all the evolutionary processes of the Hypertext Markup Language. This is a standardized process, a business-driven technical diplomacy that is critical to the development of the Internet. In fact, this is not the original computing industry.

1908, when the automatic piano manufacturers at the Iroquois Hotel in Buffalo to participate in the "Buffalo Convention", people on the piano paper roll on the number of holes per inch, there are people like 9, some people like 8. This difference will lead to increased costs, not only against the manufacturers, but also confusing users. They finally reached a consensus, so in today's world, 9 holes per inch of piano paper roll has become the standard, no one will produce other standard automatic piano.

Moving forward in the conflict

Of course, the problem of Web pages is much more complex, it requires dozens of standards to standardize text, sound, image, Interaction, protocol, code and other elements. and the World Wide Web has played the role of "www Parliament". It is a standard-setting organization that organizes meetings to allow competing organizations to sit down to develop uniform standards and then transition these criteria from "work drafts" to "candidate recommendations" and "proposed recommendations". In the end, if the standards can withstand the test, they will be eligible for "recommended by the".

The World Wide Web inventor, Tim Berners Lee (Tim Berners-lee), led the organization to a 20-year meeting. Its members include nearly 400 academic institutions, non-profit organizations and companies. The most active participants are companies that develop web software and have a large number of websites, including Google, Microsoft, and Facebook. They pay a membership fee-an annual fee of $68,500 for large U.S. companies, but not-for-profit organizations and small businesses with a much smaller annual fee, and less developed countries.

The cultural mission is to "open the World Wide Web to everyone, regardless of hardware, software, network infrastructure, language, culture, geographic location, and physical and mental capabilities." "To achieve this goal, a dedicated committee is needed to develop standard documents.

If you want to learn about the latest developments in the World Wide Web, you can visit the website to see the latest news. When you read those boring standards, you might think that the process of setting standards is a gentle and even scholarly process--all participants have a cool discussion about the position of the semicolon. But that is not the case. The process of setting important standards is sometimes peaceful, but sometimes it has to go through fierce fighting.

This is not an embarrassing secret, but rather it represents a virtuous process. "Technical standardization is a kind of commercial diplomacy. "Like diplomats, all participants want to defend their sovereignty while expanding the economic impact," said Stephen R. Walli, HP business strategy director Stephen Wally, who has participated in such activities. ”

Charles Goldfarb, who developed the "standard Generalization Markup Language" (Generalized Markup Language) in the pioneer language of HTML in 1974, said: Such standards, like legislation, Have to go through deep conflicts before they are finally established.

The Dancing Monkeys

From the beginning, HTML has set up a series of tagging rules for textual content. If you want to add a title, use the

The essence of HTML is a large number of tags. But HTML5 has become a "connective tissue" that binds a variety of other technologies, including audio, video, pictures, text, titles, citations, open canvases, 3D images, e-mail addresses, and more. It allows you to know the existence of these content and provide various channels to integrate it into the same page. You can even "verify" the page. Up to now, Apple.com has 1 HTML5 errors. This is actually very good, the New York Times website error reached 141.

In this case, validation is an ideal construct. The point is that if you follow the rules, your website will attract more visitors. However, these two pages are acceptable to most people, after all, the browser has a very high fault tolerance rate. In fact, any standard organization will eventually form an epistemology: Because of the diversity of opinions, they have to pick out some of the basic beliefs. An automated validator is a coding belief system. Not every Web site provides valid HTML, just as not all Catholics will abide by premarital sex taboos. In fact, the proportion of pages that fully adhere to the HTML specification may be very close to the percentage of Catholics who adhere to pre-marital sex taboos.

These conflicts have made HTML5 a special concern. To understand why, it must go back to June 1996, when the new version of HTML was just launched. HTML3.2 is a major update because it formally listed many of the previous practices as official standards. JavaScript has been added to the browser, so all the elements on the page can be animated. HTML3.2 didn't actually write too much about JavaScript, just wrote: "There will be scripts for future HTML." ”

"The goal of JavaScript is to make it dance when you move the mouse over a monkey." One famous critic wrote. The dancing monkeys eventually spawned more "Dancing Monkeys", first with Windows, and then with Microsoft's help to load new data via IE without refreshing the browser-Google Maps, Gmail, Twitter, Facebook and other "Web apps". Now, the entire world Wide Web is full of dancing monkeys. We still refer to the page as a "page", but many of them have actually become software applications, with a high degree of complexity and even the ability to finish word processing and run video games.

In the 2004, this change from page to application attracted the interest of many multinationals, who saw huge profit prospects from this dynamic Web page. However, the World Wide Web has been transformed for several years. They are pushing the "barrier-free Network"-by giving the web a self-describing function that allows the blind and other disabled people to use the Internet. They also wanted to develop a semantic network that would focus all of their ideas on a decentralized think tank. In order to achieve this goal, the development of the new version of HTML, namely XHTML2. With some other standards, we can improve the features of many web pages by better technical transformation. However, when the World Wide Web wants to build a barrier-free network, the entire network industry wants to "let the Monkeys dance."

WHATWG Twist Trend

It is important to emphasize that, in pursuing this goal, the world of the world seems to have become somewhat divorced from reality. For example, the emotional marker incubation group wants to mark anything with emotion. They say: "EMOTIONML provides a mechanism to represent emotions through scientifically valid descriptors." They added: "Because of the inability to agree, EMOTIONML does not provide a single emotional glossary, but rather allows users to select the most appropriate emotional vocabulary in their comments." ”

What is the effect of the concrete? You can use the following section of code to describe the happiness value of 0.5:

<emotion dimension-set= "http://www.w3.org/TR/emotion-voc/xml#pad-dimensions" ><dimension name= "Pleasure" Value= "0.5"/></emotion>

EMOTIONML also excels at expressing anger, anxiety, pain, and contempt. If this standard is recommended by the World Wide Web, then the anger of the political blog can be quantified, and you can even choose to read only the www with happy emotions.

But this is obviously not a reality. In the 2004, when the World Wide Web was engaged in this project, many changes were quietly taking place in the www. Google is on the market, Apple has sold countless songs through the Web-based itunes store, and Apple has launched its own Safari browser.

In addition, a group of engineers, from Apple, Mozilla and Opera, formed an organization called WHATWG, the abbreviation for the "Web Hypertext Technology Working Group". They are concerned about the direction of the XHTML development, fearing that the agency ignores HTML and ignores real needs.

WHATWG began working on what should be done by the World Wide Web-defining new versions of HTML, or HTML5, to assemble and standardize on a variety of emerging www technologies. Bringing these new technologies together can make the browser into a universal high-speed computer, provide smarter forms, better video and audio, and better convert documents into code, making the more cluttered world wide web more orderly. Since then, the browser has become the carrier of the application, you can run the software on it.

In 2007, the WHATWG the direction and began to deal with HTML5 in person. The emotional network that XHTML2 advocated has never really developed. WHATWG remained independent, and the two sides embarked on a not smooth cooperation.

Despite HTML5 's acceptance, there are still many questions about how the language is deployed and when it is deployed. CNET's Stephen Chackland (Stephen Shankland) has been tracking the standardization process all year round, according to his record, there have been "childish", "unbearable", "ridiculous" and "trick" in the mailing list of the technology.

Also in 2010, Steve Jobs issued an open letter declaring that HTML5-style network technology was the future, and that Adobe's Flash proprietary platform was not a burden. This letter is significant because it means that HTML5 has been blessed by a leading technology company, moving from armchair to practical exploration.

Now, after 7 years of development, the fate of HTML5 seems to have finally come to a conclusion. There is still disagreement between WHATWG and the Chackland, according to the report. It doesn't seem to matter which is the other. Both sides shoulder their responsibilities in their respective roles. A variety of conflicts will continue to emerge, then solve each other, and so on, and eventually the general standard. WHATWG apparently wants the world wide Web to end this model, but it has been the leader of the WWW for 20 years.

Today's browsers are already fast, and code writers no longer have to worry about incompatibility issues. However, they seem to focus only on speed, and no one is trying to change the core. The traditional document-driven Web is still the foundation of web pages, but the application-driven World wide Web can span platforms and support any phone. It's more complex and sometimes confusing, but it works most of the time.

Final industry standard

The HTML5 standard content is very "rich", just picture part has 14,000 words, this is only a small part, full text up to 530,000 words, reach HTML4 5 times times more. But even so lengthy, it simply describes a very small part of the World Wide Web definition. For example, he does not mention how to make JPG images or GIF images, and how they are arranged in a binary data stream. Other content is the responsibility of other organizations to develop standards that are based on more standards and can be traced back to decades ago.

Originally used for publishing and sharing documents, the World Wide Web is now an operating system that monitors phone power, records and sends voice, manages e-mail and chats, and provides a game-running environment.

Unlike Microsoft Windows or Apple Mac OS OS, the HTML5 standard is open and available to everyone. If you want to write a browser, you can get enough information at any time, there will be no concealment. There is even a special tutorial to help you start your initial work.

Any standard can refract a culture, HTML5 is no exception. It reflects our preferences for text, headlines, video and audio: We like to organize a variety of content into lists, and we like to look at images, and we want everything to be animated and interactive--every word, every tag, every structural element. All the content of HTML5 can be interpreted by code, and can be rotated and manipulated by the user.

The World Wide Web used to be a place to get information, but now it has become a place to do things. It took 10 years to reach the end of the day. Now it is 2014, HTML5 finally got the official approval. Like the Buffalo conference in 1908, you can listen to the music of the past century as long as you use a standard automatic piano.

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• This article from: Hobby Linux Technology Network
• This article link: http://www.ahlinux.com/news/10107.html

HTML5 's rectification: The game of two institutions and the birth of a standard