The-Source.com

A Brief Preface

Let me state up front one of the reasons I hate Twitter is because it is so ill-suited for any real communication. There are a very limited number of things Twitter works well for, but explaining an idea with any nuance is certainly not among them.

I hate to read too much into a tweet because everyone is trying to make a point in so few characters that I’m not sure if the person is aware of problemd and is just ignoring them  out of space considerations, or if they are ignorant of the problems, or they have proposed solutions, or what.

Joe Hewitt Speaks – People Listen

Joe Hewitt – of Firefox and Facebook fame – went on a Twitter rampage, summarized in this TechCrunch story if you want to read more. Here I’ll just focus on a few representative tweets:

Redirect your hatred of Flash to the W3C, whose embarrassingly slow pace forced devs to use a plugin because the standards were so weak.

Also, I am looking at you, developers who bitch whenever a browser offers “non-standard” but innovative APIs.

Browser makers need to go nuts with non-standard APIs and let the W3C standardize later. Waiting for the committee to innovate is suicide.

We’ve already been down this road once. It lead us to websites that wouldn’t work across browsers. I led to those little “Best viewed in:” buttons. It lead to faking user-agent strings. It lead to dozens of plugins to view a single site as designed.

We are still suffering under the fall-out of this approach, albeit to a much lesser degree every year.

I can’t imagine anyone – save proprietary software houses who want to try to take over the web again – advocating a return to this environment.

I want to stress that Mr. Hewitt is not advocating moving forward, he is advocating a return to how we did it in the past.

We begin to see the core of Mr. Hewitt’s thinking:

@ppk Yes, exactly. I’d rather developers had forced users to launch different browsers instead of making watered down x-browser sites.

Basically boils down to “put the burden on the user”. I couldn’t disagree more strongly with this way of thinking. As a Linux user, I know that the odds are “launch a different browser” will turn into ”just run IE in Windows”, and – poof – we are back in 1998.

Even if you accept that Mr. Hewitt has identified a real problem (“Standardization moves so slow it hinders innovation”), I do not think he has identified a real solution (“Let’s go back to how we used to do it.”)

There may indeed be problems with the W3C et al. and how long it takes to get standards out – no small amount of which is due to corporations gaming the standardization process by the way - but I can not accept that the proper answer is to abolish or ignore standards.

A better solution might be for standards bodies to speed up delivery of standard. Or, for corporations to quit hamstringing the decision making process. Or, for corporations to stop trying to inject proprietary technology all over a standard. Or, for standards to be released incrementally. Or, a combination of the above and probably a dozen other things I haven’t even thought of.

I hope though, that a careful consideration of Mr. Hewitt’s tweets reveals a “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” mentality that would nullify all progress we have made for standards acceptance on the web and return us to the dark days of the Browser Wars.

It is in this context that Mr. Hewitt made one additional tweet:

If CLI was the ECMA standard baked into browsers instead of ECMAScript we’d have a much more flexible web: http://bit.ly/sLILI

Miguel de Icaza Speaks – Microsoft Smiles

You don’t even have to read his blog entry to know how Mr. de Icaza reacted.

Recall Mr. de Icaza’s earlier lament:

I still believe that Microsoft lost a great opportunity of having .NET become the universal runtime of the net, and they could still have the best implementation.

Well, dry your tears for Ballmer, Miguel, because here’s a way you can give Microsoft back a “great opportunity”: stick Microsoft .NET inside Firefox!

I am absolutely fascinated by the idea and I only regret not having come up with it. We have been too focused on the Moonlight-as-a-plugin to take a step back and think in more general terms: how can we use the ECMA CIL engine for *all* applications without a browser plugin.

[...]

The only question is what browser to target first Firefox or Chrome.

(Just in case you didn’t know, “ECMA CIL” is originally “MSIL” as in “Microsoft Intermediate Language”, terminology still in quite popular use.)

Seeing the future

This entire situation is quite illustrative in one sense, because it yet another example of Team Apologista’s modus operandi:

Ignore any existing similar technology in favor of the Microsoft offering. Just like Mono rejects efforts like Vala and Java in favor of implementing patent encumbered Microsoft technology, CIL-in-a-browser rejects Google’s NaCl and Mozilla’s XUL.

People are certainly free to reinvent the wheel, it’s just laughable that Team Apologista insists on always doing it, and always doing it with Microsoft technology.

Expand Microsoft lock-in. This is part of the “lock-in” problem: generally speaking, Microsoft technology is designed to work as smooth as possible with other Microsoft technology, and as difficult as possible with non-Microsoft technology. This means that once you start down the road of using Microsoft technology it becomes ever more difficult to step outside of that ecosystem.

Thus, Team Apologista must constantly replace other parts of the development ecosystem with the Microsoft solution. If you learn a Microsoft language (C#), you can’t be using a non-Microsoft language in your browser – have to get C# in there. And that means implementing .NET in your browser. So it goes.

Move from Opt-in to Opt-out to No-opt. Everyone in the world who deals with telemarker calls or shovelware on new (Windows) computers (or uses Facebook and cares about privacy) knows that “Opt-In” is far more preferrable to the user than “Opt Out”.

So, the defense that “if the user doesn’t want Mono they can just remove it” is bogus from the start – “Opt Out” is always the defense offered by those peddling things no one wants. It becomes more bogus when non-Mono apps are replaced by Mono apps, and it explodes in a mushroom cloud of nuclear bogosity when you start sticking it in their browser.

Miguel de Icaza has proven over the past decade from day one that he intends to make .NET ubiquitious – if he gets his way it will be a crucial component of your desktop, your application choices, and even your web browsing experience.