shane glass

I received a link on Twitter yesterday to an article on The Daily Collegian Online by Andrew Metcalf, who is majoring in computer science and apparently writes regularly for the site. His article, “Apple, Jobs creating illegal monopoly with HTML5,” attempts to explain away gaping holes in Metcalf’s theory that Apple is trying to take over the open standards that make up HTML and force its own version upon the entire world.

Frankly, this idea is stupid.

I won’t bother with explaining the simple stuff since anyone who has interest in reading this probably knows a decent amount about HTML and coding for the web. But I am going to quote Metcalf and show how his statements are just stupid.

The reason for this incredibly long gap [in finalizing the HTML5 protocol] is largely because of the difficulties the leading browser manufacturers — Microsoft, Apple, Google, Mozilla, etc. — have in agreeing to a common standard. Experts have predicted it could take years before an HTML5 specification is finalized.

He’s got his facts partially right. The companies listed are the leading browser manufacturers. But, he leaves out the votes of the other 327 members of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the governing body of web standards.

My biggest problem with Metcalf’s argument is that he values a closed, proprietary platform (read: Flash) of which a single company (read: Adobe) has final say over development, accessibility, and usability. Metcalf’s argument is flawed—how can he find fault in Apple’s position, claiming the company could control a platform that over 300 members must vote on, while he completely ignores the fact that Flash is a closed system in which only one company decides its fate?

It has prohibited Flash from running on its iPhone in any capacity and is requiring developers to use its version of HTML5 to play audio, video, or display highly interactive content.

True, developers should use vendor-specific prefixes to access all of Safari’s HTML5 elements, but vendor-specific prefixes are only temporary in nature. They are used so developers can target specific browsers to add style and functionality. These prefixes are adoptions of draft elements that may or may not make it into the final standard. If, for instance, the border-radius style in CSS3 makes the standard, Apple will drop the -webkit-border-radius prefix in favor of the standard border-radius. But HTML5 elements are widely supported among most modern browsers, from Safari 4-5, Firefox 3-4, Opera 10, or the currently-vaporware Internet Explorer 9. Alexis Deveria’s extremely helpful website, When Can I Use…, shows specific elements and styles and which browsers are capable of rendering them. Safari follows along with all the other modern browsers. Internet Explorer is left in the dust except for the current vaporware version 9.0.

Flash can be a memory hog and certainly isn’t perfect, but I find it pretty obnoxious that Jobs wants to single-handedly decide the future of the internet while ignoring its evolution for the past 10 years.

I hardly consider evangelizing the continued development and future standardization of HTML5/CSS3, the language which, as Metcalf says, “is the most basic language used to make websites,” as single-handedly deciding the future of the Internet and ignoring its evolution.

On a note of personal taste, I hate most Flash. These “developers” and “designers” are polluting the web with inaccessible and horrid user interfaces.

Jobs occasionally blames the technical requirements of Flash, claiming it wouldn’t run well on a phone.

I believe Jobs doesn’t believe Flash will perform properly, not run well. It’s a matter of choice words. Any program can run on a platform if it’s coded for it. Not any program can perform properly on a platform though, especially if it’s not coded for it. This is Flash’s circumstance. Sure, it may run well on iOS, but will it perform well? I doubt it.

What’s funny to me is that this sort of anti-competitive behavior is exactly what Microsoft was sued for in 1998. Back then, Microsoft was accused of maintaining an unfair monopoly in the browser market by packaging Internet Explorer with Windows. The prosecution alleged that Microsoft could require developers to code specifically for its browser by supporting non-standard code, and therefore control the development of web standards.
Sound familiar? Whether that lawsuit was fair, legal or necessary is up for debate, but judged by that same standard, Apple is equally guilty.

Microsoft’s case was clear and absolute negligence of web standards. Apple is pushing web standards forward. The use of vendor-specific prefixes is and will be up for debate, but the progress in the last two years shows that Apple (and many other companies) are pushing for HTML5’s standardization and success on the Internet.