Web standards not keeping pace

HTML 5 is estimated to arrive in 2012. Allowing time for browsers to support the new standard and for these new browsers to become the majority is going to take at least 3 years. Therefore the next version of HTML is still 7 years away - a lifetime for the web.

The last standard to come out of the W3C was XHTML 1.1 in 2001. So 11 years between new standards is that acceptable?

It of course has to be understood the difficultly of producing standards for the web community but the time this seems to be taking for a technology as fast moving as the web is so far off the pace it’s incredible.

No wonder that proprietary systems are gaining more and more ground over time. They are simply filling the vacuum of new technology left by the standards bodies. Adobe Flash and Microsoft SilverLight provide the medium to extend web pages far and beyond what can be done with HTML. Certainly AJAX is being used heavily now as an extra layer on HTML and I never cease in being surprised at some people’s ability to use this lightweight scripting language for more and more impressive web applications but can this keep pace with the “designed for purpose” contenders like SilverLight?

Flash already has a deep penetration into the web market and various actions like Google crawling Flash better could extend its market further. SilverLight is the new boy on the block but already is picking up speed with some predictions of hugely increased market share (you’d never bet against Microsoft).

Is this good for the web? At the moment I believe yes it’s always good to have rival technologies. Competition spawns innovation. However in the long term it may not be.

If it takes, as estimated, 8 years to produce a new web standard how can this new standard bear as much relevance to the web 8 years later? If a possible Flash / SilverLight features war kicked off then the standards process would very soon be left behind - HTML would simply be the base to display the web application (or if the desktop / web blurs even more maybe HTML wouldn’t be needed at all).

In the long term if we effectively see the use of proprietary web technologies in the majority of cases, this could kill the standards process as it stands now altogether. Not good news as this standards process is inclusive allowing the general web community to be involved. Proprietary technology of course will be fashioned to the companies vision which doesn’t necessarily gel with the wider community.

So what to do? Tough one. Maybe the process needs streamlining, maybe there are just too many people involved (although decreasing this could erode the current inclusiveness), maybe the new standards are too ambitious and perhaps rather than whole new versions we should be looking at smaller incremental updates that can see new features pushed out the web quicker.