The inception of web
In the initial days when ‘The Web’ was in its inception stages, there were a few people who were putting together the nuts and bolts of how the whole concept was going to work.
Tim Berners-Lee, of course, was a great visionary with much common sense, great ideas and a solid ability to put together simple concepts which were able to achieve relatively complex tasks (something that every great web standard ought to be able to do).
There were no ‘big players in the game’ such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, eBay, Skype and so on.
The mass media, capable of shooting down any idea through leveraging simple group think, was also much less influential at the time.
The emergence of the giants
Few decades later we live in the world where conglomerates are the ’standards setters’ and play a crucial role in what is done on ‘The Web’.
Today we have Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and other big IT corporation proactively ‘contributing’ to the web standards at W3C.
They develop tools which render those standards relatively well and then implement solutions which do not follow those standards.
The situation created in real life is one where good developers follow standards as much as it is possible, while most others do not.
Microsoft creates a browser which handles most of the junk UI code pretty well, which institutes bad practices across most of the web as ’stuff just works’, even though it is poorly coded.
Since most developers do not know about, or simply do not care about standards, majority of the web content is published with very poor code.
Do not lead by example
Google’s home page could be a great example of a web page developed according to standards and best practices, but it is arguably and example of the worst practices all in one, short, simple HTML 4.01 page.
Leading by example is obviously not something that Google care about at all and therefore I question their contributions to W3C altogether.
Most mega popular web pages still contain masses of in-line code (CSS and JavaScript) stewed together with non standards-compliant HTML 4.01.
The main IT corporations are extreme examples of very bad practices in real world while we are lead to believe that Google engineers are ‘the best of the best’.
I have no doubt that Google’s engineers are the best Java developers in the world, but their front end skills are certainly somewhat to be desired!
In fact I still have not come across a single Google page which follows User Interface Best Practices and it is incredible to think that they do not really care, or know, about simplest aspects of accessibility within their interfaces.
I shall be covering more concrete examples of how Google break the web by breaking some of the simplest to implement best practices in their own web pages.
The doomsday is coming
One of the most concerning aspects of the influences conglomerates exert onto ‘The Web’ as a whole is that they all have to aim towards a monopoly.
Monopoly and oligopoly is what ultimately every corporation aims towards achieving as publicly traded corporations are forced to grow all the time in order to increase their share price.
By definition, monopoly is always bad for the end user, as it forces people into having to buy one particular brand or solution and it discourages or even purposely kills innovation.
In the case of Microsoft, they tried to monopolise through use of their own proprietary solutions and their strategy is still the same, largely based around the Windows Operating System platform.
Google ‘changed’ the rules by adopting open source technologies, only to start playing the same proprietary game like Microsoft in recent years, through development of their own APIs and their own protocols for application development in the cloud.
This approach leads to the same monopolistic outcome of lack of innovation over long term, just like Microsoft caused.
This is because it locks developers into having to work within a very closed ’standard’, which is not really a standard as it only works on Google platform and is only relevant to Google’s APIs and architecture.
Adobe pitched in with the AIR concept in order to try and grab the ‘bridge market’ between cloud and the web, with relative success, but the outcome is still that AIR is a proprietary platform solution which belongs to one, commercial company and tries to lead to monopoly at all times.
Apple, arguably the biggest ’standards criminals’ of all, have for a very long time openly deployed an approach of locking users in and always developing entirely proprietary solutions, which they then monetised heavily once the users got used to the initial devices they bought and realised they could not port to other platforms.
Apple are extending the same approach to the web with iTunes and the iPhone platform with significant success and many developers are more than happy to ‘buy into’ the whole concept as they might make money out of it, just like many people bought into Google’s ‘free’ solutions which meant giving all the data away for free, leading to a heavy potential long term ‘lock in’, as shifting massive amounts of data from one provider to another is always likely to be a massive hassle.
Last but not least, various mobile phone corporations have, in recent years, jumped in on the act and, through their leverage of various mobile devices, started creating their own platforms, which implement their own APIs, their own ‘lock-in protocols’ and their own ways of thinking about application development.
Nokia spring to mind with their own proprietary ‘mobile web services plaform’, while BlackBerry’s browser does not support many of the typically used web standards on regular pages, leading to ‘broken Web’ when browsing many web sites through a BlackBerry.
With mobile devices so versatile in nature, a day of a ’standard mobile device’ looks virtually impossible to achieve, which may mean that generic mobile web solutions will always be impossible to develop.
The breakdown
As Tim Berners-Lee points out in almost every single one of his presentations, interoperability is the ultimate goal of the Internet and that interoperability is achieved through wide, commonly adopted, open and non-proprietary standards.
Since corporations aim to monopolise, Tim’s vision becomes the enemy of the corporate strategy and the web becomes broken.
Big corporations will therefore kill the web over time, since they will always be happier with monopolising one piece of the global pie, rather than playing an ‘open game’ in an interoperable, standards enabled, free-for-all, mega information playground, which has absolutely wonderful potential.
Written by Jason Grant on 12th May 2009