Latest HTML5 working draft published despite claims of 'sabotage'

The search for a conspiracy theory

So how deep was this problem? According to the HTML5 document's designated author, Ian Hickson, it was the standards world's equivalent of a Senate filibuster: "The latest publication of HTML5 is now blocked by Adobe, via an objection that has still not been made public (despite yesterday's promise to make it so)," Hickson wrote. He cited a source who apparently wished to remain anonymous, for reasons he said had to do with belonging to "one of the secret W3C member lists," implying that the Working Group had a public agenda and a private one. This despite the fact that the differences between Masinter's and Cotton's perception of the matter may have been trivial at best.

Later, in a blog post entitled "Sabotage!" obviously intended to raise the eyebrows of would-be news aggregators, Opera Software engineer Anne Van Kesteren essentially alleged Adobe -- the manufacturer of Flash, a proprietary graphics technology -- was blocking the forward progress of HTML5 on a technicality: "The objection to HTML Canvas 2D Context is spurious in particular since it has been part of the W3C draft of HTML5 since the very beginning," Van Kesteren wrote. "The scope question for that API has been raised two years ago and was resolved back then, involving all the layers of W3C, including its Director. That it is now decided to publish it is a separate document does not change the resolution of this decision on scope."

But while the "sabotage" story was raging, the creator of the Web himself, Tim Berners-Lee, called upon the W3C to implement an "annotation" to the Working Group charter to enable the modularity that Cotton referred to. "I agree with the WG chairs that these items -- data and Canvas -- are reasonable areas of work for the group. It is appropriate for the group to publish documents in this area. On the one hand, they elaborate areas touched on in HTML4. On the other, these elaborations are much deeper than the features of HTML4, but also they form separate subsystems, and these subsystems have strong overlaps with other design areas. It is important (a) that the design be modular; (b) that the specifications be kept modular and (c) that the communities of expertise of the respective fields (graphics and data) be involved in the design process. I am asking the domain lead to annotate the charter in place to make these points clearer to newcomers."

Calling the entire substance of the blocking/filibuster allegation "hooey" in a personal blog post two weeks ago, Larry Masinter revealed not only that he followed through with his procedural objection, but he essentially got what he wanted: a change in the charter of the Working Group so that it did encompass Canvas 2D, rather than having a charter that appeared to contradict its own work. But then Masinter's retort took on the broader, and more timeless, topic of what the devil is going on here anyway.

"Updating the charter to say these things were in scope was always a way of bringing them into scope," Masinter wrote. "That W3C wanted to save face and call it an 'annotation' and skip the normal W3C rechartering process -- well, so many exceptions were made for HTML in the first place, that's fine. What makes a 'standard' process 'open' isn't just 'everyone can read the mailing list.' Trying to follow the HTML standard requires withstanding a 'denial of service' attack; thousands of e-mails, messages, posts, edits to track every single month. No one person can really follow what's going on.

"I've worked on scores (more than 20 and probably more than 40) different working group charters," Masinter continued. "I think I really understand why working groups have charters, how the words in a charter are chosen carefully, and why it's important to keep things in scope. Is that being nit-picky? Yes, but that's what I do. And, I claim, it's what makes good standards: Follow process, pay attention to details. My perspective is that what makes a good standard is very different than what makes a good implementation guide. Many otherwise good software engineers (even those with a great deal of experience) really don't see it, since their experience and intuitions have served them well in building complex software systems, or leading open source projects."

As of now, the HTML5 Working Drafts are officially published, with Canvas 2D among a handful of specifications broken out into modular drafts of their own, as Berners-Lee advised. And that prompted a note of applause last Friday from Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 Program Manager Adrian Bateman: "Just like good software design, loose coupling and high cohesion are good principles for defining web standards. That doesn't make them easy to apply and there is still more work to do to reduce the coupling between drafts. The group is working on improving the tools used to generate the documents to improve the cross-references, which will help towards this goal."

Bateman's comments have contributed to blog posts today pointing to "rumors" that IE9, and Microsoft in turn, would come around to supporting HTML5. This despite the fact that its own man may be to thank for getting the whole draft put together prior to Microsoft's MIX conference next week.