Eyes Above The Waves

I belatedly read a few blog comments complaining that Firefox is corrupting the Web by implementing nonstandard tags like <canvas> and prematurely implementing CSS3 columns.

Bollocks. You can't make good standards without implementation experience and you don't know you have a good implementation until a lot of people have used it. We take what safeguards we can to avoid poisoning the Web with a nonconformant implementation. In particular with CSS3 columns, we currently only honour -moz-column-* properties. When the standard is settled and we implement it well enough, then we'll start supporting the standard column-* properties. In the meantime anyone using -moz-column-* knows they're off the standards map. This approach will help us get a solid columns spec --- and conformant implementations --- faster.

With <canvas> the situation is a little different. It may not be blessed by the W3C (yet) but it has everything else going for it: a good spec developed in the open; interoperable, independent implementations from three vendors (two of which are open source); and it doesn't interfere with any existing standard. In short it's a fine quasi-standard.

A larger point is that work like CSS3 columns and <canvas> is required to move the Web forward. If the Web does not move forward --- if we spend all our energy refining existing specifications with fixed functionality, and developing perfect implementations of them --- then it will be replaced by something that is moving forward, which won't be based on standards, and then all our magnificent standards won't do us any good at all.

On another tack, Jim Ley writes:

I'm not convinced by canvas, IE has had 2D and 3D drawing API's and the ability to redirect HTML to an image since IE4, no-one used them, the use cases aren't really there, it's just gimicky effects, and single threaded javascript is way too slow, and bad an authoring environment for creating anything but toys.

That's an interesting suggestion. I could quibble with the facts (IE has a 3D drawing API?) but I'd rather counter with the observation that we've been able to do AJAX-style applications since before IE4, so why did it only explode over the last couple of years? I think for a long time we laboured under preconceived ideas about what Web apps could and should be. It took some adventurous coding from people like Google for everyone to raise their ambitions. I hope that with these new Web features people raise their ambitions some more.