| ▲ | isodev 2 days ago |
| I love the little historical overview in the post. With more than 25 years of hindsight, the push against user-centred standards is so obvious. W3C is always better than whatever coolaid-du-jour big corps wants you to drink because (at the very least), someone actually thinks "how is this going to affect people using it" as opposed to Google/Apple's approach "How is this going to affect our revenue". |
|
| ▲ | StopDisinfo910 2 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| To be honest, in my recollection, in 2013 what the W3C was doing was actually seen as user hostile and HTML5 was seen as a good thing for users. Part of the community really hated XHTML and its strictness. I remember Mozilla being at the vanguard then rather than Google. I think the situation was and is a lot more messy and complicated than what the article presents but presenting it fully would make for a less compelling narrative. As is I don’t really buy it personally. |
| |
| ▲ | newyorkahh 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Hostile actions would be IE’s strategy for monopolizing browser in 90s and Google paying Apple and Mozilla to monopolize search starting in 2004, killing off Reader in 2013. Taking over standards groups is a gray area with tradeoffs. It helped Google preserve monopoly in search but clearly devs and the web benefited as well. XHTML2 was panned because it was super strict without clear benefits. Keeping HTML backwards compatible is clearly a very good thing. I don’t fully understand the author’s passion for XSLT- it’s cumbersome and it wasn’t popular with devs. I agree with the headline and some aspects but XML is a bad hill to die on and much of the writing is hyperbolic and more than a little out of touch. | |
| ▲ | int_19h 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I've been there at the time, and the pushback against XHTML always struck me as disingenuous. XHTML was not at all difficult to write! The only real argument against it was that it wasn't always valid HTML, and browsers didn't want to support it specifically, so when people published XHTML pages it would sometimes break if the browser tried to interpret it as HTML. But they have broken HTML backwards compatibility so much worse many times since then... | |
| ▲ | queenkjuul a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I do agree reality was a lot more messy, but i also think it still paints a compelling case that Google in particular acted how it did (mostly) to shape the web to its own best interests. That it wasn't literally "Google railroaded WHATWG/W3C/everyone else to get what it wanted" doesn't mean Google didn't take advantage of the situation to kill open web standards to its own benefit. I imagine Mozilla, for instance, went along with as much as they did because Google accounted for most of their revenue. | |
| ▲ | Devasta 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Part of the community really hated XHTML and its strictness. A big part of this is that people were concatenating XML together manually, to predictable disaster. Nowadays they use JSX and TypeScript, far more strict than XML ever was, and absolutely love it. | | |
| ▲ | isodev 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > Nowadays they use JSX and TypeScript And we're already moving away from that, landing us into HTMX/hypermedia and other fancy tools which aren't really concerned with JSX. So things come and go, but standards stay to keep things working and options available for people with different constraints. It's not up to Google to be deciding all that just by themselves. |
|
|
|
| ▲ | api 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Nobody pays for anything with user centric standards. If software were free to produce and services were free to run this would work, but it doesn’t. Software in particular is incredibly time consuming and expensive, especially if you want to make it usable. |
| |
| ▲ | wobfan 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > Nobody pays for anything with user centric standards. ???
Why do you think this? | | |
| ▲ | api 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Do people buy chat apps? Web browsers? Web servers? Web content? Clients or servers for other open standards? No, which means you’ll never see them get the level of polish or investment that closed stuff gets. Because when it’s closed you can make people pay or monetize it with advertising. I’m not cheering for this. Don’t shoot the messenger. I’m pointing out why things are this way. A major problem is that while free software efforts can build working software, it often takes orders of magnitude more work to make software mere mortals can use. That kind of UI/UX polish is also the work programmers hate doing, so you have to pay them to do it. Therefore closed stuff always wins on UI/UX. That means it always takes the network effect. UX polish is the moat that free has never been able to cross. | | |
| ▲ | newyorkahh 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | You’re right, but browsers are free because their cost is a drop in the bucket compared to the profits a monopolized browser status quo provides, for Windows/Office in 90s snd search/ads with Google. MS started it with free IE and Google improved upon their strategy. | |
| ▲ | queenkjuul a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If the "spy on users and sell the data" business model were illegal, you bet your ass people would pay for chat. People were paying per message to send SMS once upon a time! | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Do people buy chat apps? Web browsers? Web servers? Web content? Yes. (Slack. Orion. Since when were servers free?) The web basically fractures into people who watch ads and complain about paywalls and those who don’t. | | |
| ▲ | scarface_74 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | People don’t buy Slack. Corporations do. They also buy Teams… | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > People don’t buy Slack. Corporations do. One, corporate cash is just as good as people cash. Two, people absolutely paid for WhatsApp before it was acquired. And three, I am a people and I personally pay for Microsoft 365 and on occasion have used Teams. | | |
| ▲ | moritzwarhier 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > people absolutely paid for WhatsApp before it was acquired Wasn't that a one-time payment of 1$? No, I wouldn't pay for WhatsApp. | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > Wasn't that a one-time payment of 1$? I think it was $1/year. > I wouldn't pay for WhatsApp Plenty wouldn’t have. There are ad and data-supported models for them. |
| |
| ▲ | scarface_74 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | B2B sales by definition is where the buyer is not the user. The software doesn’t have to be anything the end user wants or have a good user experience. In corporate sells, it often just has to be in the right upper quadrant of Gartner’s Magic Square. They definitely weren’t bought by corporations because they care about open standards or great UX. | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > weren’t bought by corporations because they care about open standards or great UX OP said open products lose because they lack “UI/UX polish.” | | |
| ▲ | JustExAWS 2 days ago | parent [-] | | And how many B2B apps have you used that have “polish”? Slack is okay. But at the end of the day, it’s another crappy Electron app. | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > how many B2B apps have you used that have “polish”? Slack is okay. But at the end of the day, it’s another crappy Electron app Sure. My point is polish isn’t a reason closed source sells and attracts investment. Folks will pay for terrible UX. (Including users.) | | |
| ▲ | aspenmayer a day ago | parent [-] | | Closed source sells because open source devs don't know sales or marketing. In many cases, developers are the only users that the devs even acknowledge. Just look at the successful/popular open source projects. There are nearly no paid open source apps, though most of everything is turning into software as a service. Open source is built in such a way as to make outside investment very difficult to justify by most private investors. Why pay good money for something you already get for free? This is a flawed metaphor, because investors aren't purchasing anything, as investment isn't a transaction, but I think that's why we don't see more sales and investment in open source. It seems fundamentally ill-suited toward those aims and ends. I think successful open source businesses are outliers, and as such are pretty interesting. The only recently founded one I can think of that does hardware is Flipper Zero. I'm sure there are others. I'd be curious about who others think are the outliers in this reading, as those are folks whose work I'd love to hear about. |
|
|
|
|
| |
| ▲ | queenkjuul a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | People buy discord nitro, though |
| |
| ▲ | api 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Slack is an example of a user-centric open protocol? Slack proves my point. It's closed and vertically integrated and people pay for it. Nobody paid for the open precursors to Slack so they stagnated. | | |
|
|
| |
| ▲ | piva00 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | People definitely do pay for it when it's available, even more at the core of this issue is that people would prefer alternatives that are open, where their data can be easily ported to some competitor service if it's better which directly affects the bottomline from companies that push against open standards. I think you got it clearly reversed in your mind... | | |
| ▲ | api 2 days ago | parent [-] | | They prefer it but they don’t pay for it. | | |
| ▲ | piva00 2 days ago | parent [-] | | They also don't pay for the non-standards stuff, what's your point? Chrome, Facebook, Instagram. For the paid services like Apple's there's no even an alternative following open standards. They don't pay because there are no options of services provided by these companies following open standards, exactly because companies wouldn't be able to lock users in their solutions if open standards were commonly deployed and used... | | |
| ▲ | aspenmayer a day ago | parent [-] | | It's kind of a chicken and egg problem. Let's say for the sake of the argument that you can check out all the data and metadata from all of the sites you want to. Now what? Where would you check it in? "Build it and they will come" kinda falls flat when there's no there there to, you know, build it. It's like advocating for building a highway to the middle of nowhere because in our mind the field of dreams is inside all of us, so the center of the universe would be ideal, but there are already things built there and we want folks to appreciate the game and our collective love of it, so we had to build it way out here. Open standards are one part of "building it," but not the whole of it, so it might be a bit premature to be asking where everybody is. You have to draw the rest of the owl. We're building sandcastles in the sky. What is the point of all these column inches if it doesn't lend itself to building the destinations that you wish to visit? The best defense is a good offense. Whining and complaining can help identify a problem and motivate others to share your view that the problem exists and is worth solving. Making new year's resolutions and telling folks about it isn't actually doing the work. Community organizing is like step 0. Now comes the actually hard part, being the change you want to see in the world. |
|
|
|
|
