Open Standards In Trouble:

Will the W3C Maintain Its Relevance?

There are dozens of browsers, thousands and thousands of apps for online use in both the design and administration of a web site, more and more features are appearing on even the simplest sites and, what once looked like an orderly flow of open standards has turned ugly with the filing of Opera’s anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft.

The World Wide Web Consortium - Web Hosting Provider Explains

It’s a loose affiliation of software developers, SEOs and other tech-types that has set out on a noble mission – to unify the web with open design, construction and administration standards that will apply to ALL web sites.

The benefits to all of us using the same coding conventions and software are enormous. Sites work in all browsers. (Right now they don’t.) My site can talk to your site seamlessly because both were constructed to do so using open standards that, at least in theory, unify the mishmash being employed by different site designers. And with new technologies evolving like protozoa in the Web 2.0 era, the W3C has been working late into the night to keep up with this expanding plethora of new tech, new software, more stable browsers and higher expectations on the part of web users - web hosting provider explains.

Ogg Vorbis Audio and Ogg Theora Video

We’ve arrived at HTML 5.0 for those who didn’t notice. Hyper-text mark-up language (HTML) has evolved. HTML is the digital language of the web, the basis for web site construction and interaction between sites and users. There are variations on the HTML theme, i.e. XML (extensible mark-up language) XHTML (extensible hyper-text mark-up language) and several other varieties, but all worked with the basic HTML protocols so all sites were in sync.

To learn more about the working draft of HTML 5.0, you don’t have to look far. This link will take you to discussion group threads where designers are lining up to state their preferences for open standards moving forward.

The HTML5 Working Group, however, has become engaged in a debate over which codecs browsers should be supported. Both Apple and Nokia – big players in the open standards debate – succeeded in removing Ogg Vorbis and Theora from the current standards draft being prepared by the W3C. The reasons these companies cited were patent and copyright uncertainties. However, the W3C has focused primarily on PC programming and browsers, and the lack of support offered by Nokia and Apple of these W3C open standards for audio and video presentations created an obvious rift – one that the high-powered Apple and Nokia have eliminated.

The Response from the Xiph Foundation

The Xiph Foundation is responsible for the Ogg series of audio and video tools required in this new age of web design. Xiph put out a position paper that made clear that this was a chicken-egg question.

From the Xiph Foundation position paper on the use of Ogg audio and video as W3C open standards:

“So, how do you make Theora and Vorbis popular? Why, by the very same process that made MP3 so ubiquitous: by using it and by sharing it. Only by advocating the formats will you see interest from the corporations. There is no other way around it. Let me write that one more time: there is no other way around it. Backup your films in Theora. Backup your music in Vorbis. Share podcasts and video casts in these formats. And do not wait for tomorrow; do it now. And by now, I mean yesterday.

There’s a lot of companies out there who do not wish to see Theora and Vorbis succeed, and they don’t even have to make much of an effort to affect them. The masses out there with their expensive iPod toys don’t care about Vorbis or Theora. Most of them don’t even know what they are.”

The Big Players Have Big Clout

Microsoft, the biggest player in content management and delivery software, has never been a strong supporter of the W3C’s effort to standardize web protocols. Bill Gates and company don’t want an outside group telling them what should be standard and what shouldn’t. As the 800-pound gorilla, they, of course, want to set the standards.

Ogg authority, Manual Amador, posted a blog with regard to the removal of Ogg Vorbis and Theora from the working paper being compiled on OS. In it, he points out the advantages of Ogg A/V programming to designers and to manufacturers.

In part, Mr. Amador’s post reads:

“- The Xiph developers were extremely zealous and almost fiduciarily [sic] diligent in researching all possible patent threats to Vorbis technology, and for more than a year they found none — they even did the research “before” beginning to code, explicitly to avoid submarine patents. I know, because I was subscribed to their mailing list and read status updates of this research, practically at the start of the project.

I also know that big-name software houses and media players manufacture products with Vorbis technology, and none of them have been sued. It’s been what, seven years now?

- The Theora codec has had its patents practically relinquished by On3 with a perpetual, royalty-free license.

- Ogg and its audio/video codec technologies are the ONLY free software media technologies with implementations widely available on all consumer computing platforms — from WM codecs to Linux DLLs, passing through the entire range of hardware (floating-point and fixed-point)and OSs.

- Without guaranteed Ogg support (whose integration in user agents I think I already established to be sort of a weekend-level junior programmer project at NO COST, due to the ready availability of the technology in all platforms), authors will be forced to use patent-encumbered technology.

Remember MP3? Well, with HTML5 it’s 1997 all over again.”

The battle between manufacturers to set technology standards has never been clearer than the undermining of the inclusion of Ogg Vorbis and Theora in the W3C’s revised standards. It’s beta versus VHS all over again, and companies like Microsoft, which threw a monkey wrench into the whole Ogg debate, are determined to politicize and monetize the World Wide Web Consortium’s standardization efforts.

And because the W3 is an independent group that can only make suggestions, companies like Microsoft, Apple, Nokia and other tech giants have highly-paid lawyers who are scouring patents as you read this looking for an infringement on the part of Ogg. According to Manual Amador’s blog post, this work has already been done by legal at Ogg.

The Bottom Line

It really comes down to this: the big companies in web design, construction and administration want a say in the open standards established by the W3C. However, the W3C should be impervious to corporate pressures and threatened lawsuits and keep its focus on what is going to produce the most effective and efficient web experience for the user.

Once again, the user is the last one considered in these corporate dust-ups. And you can’t help but wonder if the big techs recognize the value of unified standards to the long-term growth of the web.

It seems that the corporate realm is concerned only with short-term returns and additional costs to adapt existing services and software. It’s time the CEOs and other management big wigs at these corporations (yes, that’s you Mr. Gates) recognize the need for web uniformity and standardization. It’s in the company’s best interests and, most certainly, in the end users’ best interests.

Finally, with the W3C now the target of legal pressure, the organization has become politicized and its once noble mission to bring cohesiveness to the web seems very much in doubt.

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