Microsoft joins HTML 5 standard fray in earnest | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft joins HTML 5 standard fray in earnest

news.cnet.com

12 pointssuprgeek13 comments

Microsoft has a well-known strategy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish Embrace, Extend and Extinguish. As one of the other commentators pointed out, they followed a similar model in the ODF Vs OOXML fiasco. First: do not join until late in the game. Next: complain loudly about features and options even though they were fully aware of their existence and had many chances to get in the game to influence them. When told that it is too late or that their comments do not make sense, react by introducing incompatible or proprietary stuff that no other vendor could possibly adopt due to its closed source nature. - Result, the so called standard is rendered a little less "standard" because of Microsoft's refusal to play nice. The software development community loses out and Microsoft goes back to its "business as usual". The nature of Microsoft's comments here makes it clear that this is the second step, namely "complain loudly" that they are unhappy about some of the tags. This will go on for a while, until they will just start bundling proprietary stuff with IE 9.0.

I saw Embrace, Extend, Extinguish play out first hand with the standardization of SPF. Things seem to be going well and seemingly right before consensus, Microsoft shows up and says it won't work because clients, namely Outlook, don't support it, despite that it has nothing to do with MUAs. This distracts people enough so that Microsoft has enough time to come up with SenderID, which co-opts the data format of SPF allowing MS to say they are trying to be compatible when it really subverts the intent of the standard. They also claimed they may or may not have patent interests but won't say exactly what they are, that will have to wait until after everything is standardized and the patents are filed--because since this is such an innovative idea Microsoft is being kind enough to file patents so that the community and standard is protected in the event someone else is waiting with a submarine patent, even though the IETF discourages standards that are patent encumbered. Microsoft gets to say it is trying to work with the community, and through press releases and public policy statements confuses the goals and intent of SPF and SenderID. IETF decides to create two RFCs and gives them Experimental status, thereby almost ensuring that no one will adopt either fully, but to this day we still need to create multiple DNS records and are never sure exactly how email receiving systems will interpret them.

(working from years-old memory, I don't mean to present the above as representative of the exact order of events, but I'm sure someone else could be found who could reasonably corroborate it)

Actual headline: "Microsoft joins HTML 5 standard fray in earnest"

From the guidelines: "You can make up a new title if you want, but if you put gratuitous editorial spin on it, the editors may rewrite it."

What part of the article said anything about derailing? Sigh.

Must a posting preserve the editorial spin in the original headline? "In Earnest" indicates sincere and intense conviction. This value judgement is at odds with journalistic neutrality, isn't it? I took the HN headline to be a removal of editorial spin, not an addition of gratuitous spin. (Edit: Ok, I missed the word 'derailing'. Both headlines are spintastic.)

I would rather trust the journalist (or editor or author) of the piece to come up with his or her own headlines. Even if the headline is "spintastic" -- which I don't see in this case -- presumably it accurately reflects the article. That's kind of the point of headlines.

Checking to see if a headline accurately reflects the article is a poor decision procedure for detecting the presence or absence of spin. The most you can say, when they match, is that the headline and the article might have similar spin.

But no need to presume, the article is right there. It makes no statement at all about the Microsoft's motivations, let alone the sincerity of them.

The phrase "in earnest", on the other hand, asserts a frame for interpreting the event - the same function served by the word "derailing" in the HN headline. Interpretive frames are the very essence of spin.

FTFA: "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."

This is important. For years noted Web designers have been touting "designing with Web standards", and for good reason. While there are many sweet things in HTML5, treating what's defined today as if it were some final spec risks creating, over time, a hodgepodge of not-quite HTML5 documents.

This is important, but not for the reasons you think.

Refusing to support (or implement or discuss or contribute to) a standard up until after it has been ratified as a full standard is Microsoft's favourite new technique for derailing standards.

On first glance it seems reasonable but imagine if everyone followed the same rule. There would be no standard for anyone to follow, or if people forged ahead and wrote the standard anyway it would have no real world implementation and as a result be entirely useless.

If you think they do support web standards then note they use the exact same tactic with ODF. I trust no-one is stupid enough to think that Microsoft is in any way enthusiastic for that standard to get traction.

There's a fine line between derailing and simply not helping. The process is going fine without them and they're only shooting themselves in the foot by not putting their two cents in.

"This is important, but not for the reasons you think."

I was speaking to developers who want to treat HTML5 today as a proper standard, and push out Web sites with HTML5 features, while the spec is still under development.

But I think the tactic there is that if enough sites are using a common set of non-standard features supported by FF, Opera, etc, but not IE.whatver, then users of IE.whatever will eventually push Microsoft to implement these features.

I realize that part of getting a usable standard in place is to first put possible usable standards into action, but it's reasonable to wonder if every feature people decide to push for or to act on should or will make the final cut.

I hardly expect Microsoft to act out of altruism, (nor do I expect that of Google), but I also don't assume every question raised by Microsoft is done for malicious reasons.

If the alternative is that the spec is developed in a vacuum and takes longer to finish, I'll deal with some imperfect documents. Those will happen anyway.

Source: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=749299

Wake me up when they implement SVG and canvas.

No, they don't care about HTML5 no matter how they spin it.

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