We’re new to this one, but according to DaringFireball, it appears that Adobe has been trying to slow down the HTML5 ratification process by sending in objections whenever they can. Could there be a reasonable explanation for Adobe objecting to HTML5 ratification? Adobe’s man in question, Larry Masinter, has a pretty distinguished career both with Adobe and also the W3C consortium so we wouldn’t want to judge this hastily without all of the facts.
Anybody out there with more information on the subject?
Update: Masinter posts this in the comments:
No part of HTML5 is, or was ever, “blocked” in the W3C HTML Working Group — not HTML5, not Canvas 2D Graphics, not Microdata, not Video — not by me, not by Adobe.
Neither Adobe nor I oppose, are fighting, are trying to stop, slow down, hinder, oppose, or harm HTML5, Canvas 2D Graphics, Microdata, video in HTML, or any of the other significant features in HTML5.
Claims otherwise are false. Any other disclaimers needed?
There are some things that are wrong with the spec I’d like to see fixed. There are some things that are really, really, wrong with the process that I’d like to improve.
I’ve been working on web standards since the beginning of the web in the early 90s, and standards for even longer; long before I joined Adobe. My opinions don’t come from Adobe, and I don’t get approval or direction. I hate to see decades of work on web architecture messed up in the short-term interest of grabbing control of the web platform for a few vendors to own. If you think that position doesn’t match what you imagine Adobe’s position is, well, I’m glad Adobe’s planning to support HTML5 in its products.
As for the HTML standards process: I’ve worked in scores of standards groups in IETF and W3C, as well as a few others here and there, and I’ve never seen anything as bad as this one, with people abusing their official positions to grandstand and promote proprietary advantage. I’ve blogged some about this, but I’d rather fix things along.
I think progress of HTML5 in W3C could be faster if the subsections on graphics and metadata could (if not now, then eventually) be moved to separate subgroups focused on those topics. The organization of work in W3C is determined by the “charters” of working group and the “scope” of he charters, so saying work is “out of scope” even if you are marking a snapshot of the (already published) documents as “Working Draft”, means you might rewrite the “Status of This Document” section to say that it might move. That’s what I was asking for, in the somewhat stilted language of “objection”.
If you want to know who is sending in technical objections, you can see the working group mailing list at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/. And if you want to see more of my opinions, I’m also on the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) and post there a lot, seehttp://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/; the TAG often discusses HTML5.
Any more questions about my opinion? My email address should be easy to find.
Also John Dowdell Post this:
Seth… Ian posted that early Friday morning, and most people were mystified by it through the day. By Friday afternoon the mystery seemed best resolved by comments at Ajaxian:
http://ajaxian.com/archives/adobe-html5-standards-blocking-and-the-evil-…
Today Thom Holwerda has a wrapup at OSNews:
http://www.osnews.com/story/22874/Teacup_Meet_Storm_pt_IV_Adobe_Blocking…
(I don’t know what the full story is either… Hickson’s post had no detail, and although active on Reddit, he hasn’t confirmed what it is that he’s warning about. I’m not sure when John Gruber first heard about it.)
jd/adobe
Adobe, how about you take a breath, admit that Flash is bulky, buggy, and dying, and instead of complaining about Apple and HTML5, you improve your own product?
That might entail more honest breaths than they were hoping to have to take.
Flash is used for 3 reasons…
#1 “codec free” Video format
#2 games
#3 animation
All of which can be done in HTML5
#1 will be the slowest to convert… so HTML5 needs a few years to mature before it is adopted world wide.
#2 – Well.. I still see Shockwave out there so… this is a format that Apple can establish a trend easily. The world wants a new standard!
#3 Goodness… please adopt HTML5….Most sites go down because of all the flash advertising and crap they use on pages…
I am behind Apple’s stance… Google is also making this the future… so Adobe… suck it up.. and spent your R&D on new tools to make it easy to implement HTML5!
Seth… Ian posted that early Friday morning, and most people were mystified by it through the day. By Friday afternoon the mystery seemed best resolved by comments at Ajaxian:
http://ajaxian.com/archives/adobe-html5-standards-blocking-and-the-evil-of-the-private-backroom#comments
Today Thom Holwerda has a wrapup at OSNews:
http://www.osnews.com/story/22874/Teacup_Meet_Storm_pt_IV_Adobe_Blocking_HTML5_/
(I don’t know what the full story is either… Hickson’s post had no detail, and although active on Reddit, he hasn’t confirmed what it is that he’s warning about. I’m not sure when John Gruber first heard about it.)
jd/adobe
Seth… Ian posted that early Friday morning, and most people were mystified by it through the day. By Friday afternoon the mystery seemed best resolved by comments at Ajaxian:
http://ajaxian.com/archives/adobe-html5-standards-blocking-and-the-evil-of-the-private-backroom#comments
Today Thom Holwerda has a wrapup at OSNews:
http://www.osnews.com/story/22874/Teacup_Meet_Storm_pt_IV_Adobe_Blocking_HTML5_/
(I don’t know what the full story is either… Hickson’s post had no detail, and although active on Reddit, he hasn’t confirmed what it is that he’s warning about. I’m not sure when John Gruber first heard about it.)
jd/adobe
The answer is obvious. Sure, Larry has a distinguished career with Adobe and this is the reason for all of the objections. Let’s face it, if it wasn’t for Flash my G3 would be viable and doing a lot more than serving as a cool jukebox. Everything runs flawlessly on it except of course, for flash. It was poorly written from the start and has been added to without any revamping. Adobe puts their faith in “advancing chip speed technology” and therefor do not care that flash is such a hog. I was a long time flash developer and I can tell you this fact .. Flash is so poorly written that it takes upwards up %75 CPU usage just to move a butterfly from one side of the screen to the other. Utterly ridiculous. HTML5 is a start to giving developers the tools for rich web content without flash, and Adobe is scared.
No part of HTML5 is, or was ever, “blocked” in the W3C HTML Working Group — not HTML5, not Canvas 2D Graphics, not Microdata, not Video — not by me, not by Adobe.
Neither Adobe nor I oppose, are fighting, are trying to stop, slow down, hinder, oppose, or harm HTML5, Canvas 2D Graphics, Microdata, video in HTML, or any of the other significant features in HTML5.
Claims otherwise are false. Any other disclaimers needed?
There are some things that are wrong with the spec I’d like to see fixed. There are some things that are really, really, wrong with the process that I’d like to improve.
I’ve been working on web standards since the beginning of the web in the early 90s, and standards for even longer; long before I joined Adobe. My opinions don’t come from Adobe, and I don’t get approval or direction. I hate to see decades of work on web architecture messed up in the short-term interest of grabbing control of the web platform for a few vendors to own. If you think that position doesn’t match what you imagine Adobe’s position is, well, I’m glad Adobe’s planning to support HTML5 in its products.
As for the HTML standards process: I’ve worked in scores of standards groups in IETF and W3C, as well as a few others here and there, and I’ve never seen anything as bad as this one, with people abusing their official positions to grandstand and promote proprietary advantage. I’ve blogged some about this, but I’d rather fix things along.
I think progress of HTML5 in W3C could be faster if the subsections on graphics and metadata could (if not now, then eventually) be moved to separate subgroups focused on those topics. The organization of work in W3C is determined by the “charters” of working group and the “scope” of he charters, so saying work is “out of scope” even if you are marking a snapshot of the (already published) documents as “Working Draft”, means you might rewrite the “Status of This Document” section to say that it might move. That’s what I was asking for, in the somewhat stilted language of “objection”.
If you want to know who is sending in technical objections, you can see the working group mailing list at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/. And if you want to see more of my opinions, I’m also on the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) and post there a lot, see http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/; the TAG often discusses HTML5.
Any more questions about my opinion? My email address should be easy to find.
It’s good to finally see Adobe responding to some of the rumors and “news” surrounding Flash and HTML5.
Many of us are waiting for a statement on the following questions:
1. Why is the flash plugin for OS X the number one reason for browser crashes? What is being done to resolve this. This problem has been around for years and is really degrading the browsing experience.
2. Steve Jobs called Adobe lazy. Most likely referring to the problem stated above. That problem and most likely security problems being the reason why Flash is excluded on many mobile devices. When are we going to see a reliable, safe and scalable solution for mobile devices that Microsoft and Apple can safely implement?
If you asked your questions a little more neutrally perhaps Adobe would respond.
But clearly you’re looking for a fight and are happy with Sliverlite.
“Petethefreeze”, we haven’t seen evidence for that first claim. As Flash PM Tom Barclay says at The Register, we’re hoping Apple opens up those anecdotal reports a bit more:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/15/adobe_air_mobile/
I’m not sure what Steve Jobs said… his media organization has neither confirmed nor denied those reports. It’s like how Hickson didn’t follow up on his statements, on how Gruber didn’t follow up on his outdated republication. If you’ll read the news, though, you’ll see every manufacturer, save one, is building good experiences with Flash.
jd/adobe
Adobe dudes, let me give you an analogy:
You don’t win a game of football* by complaining about the rules. You win by getting on the field and completing some passes. You guys are making a lot of fumbles at the moment.
Many of us end users and content creators would rather you guys stop whining and start fixing your products. Why don’t you provide email addresses here– I’m sure many of us would be happy to send our Safari crash logs to you so that you can see just what a steaming pile Flash on OS X is. Yes, I’ve installed Click-to-Flash just so I don’t have to deal with useless Flash ads eating most of my computer’s processor cycles when I’m just checking the news.
*American football, fyi.
With something as important as the HTML5 spec, it’s perfectly reasonable to clarify whats within the scope of the spec. This is not a fumble, this a complete non-story and what looks suspiciously like a FUD campaign against Adobe.
Enjoy your brave new world where n00b ad developers are using the awesome power of HTML5 to eat your CPU cycles and crash – or at least hang – your browser. I can assure you the problem you experience will follow where all the n00b ad developers go. Click2Flash is not going to save you then either.
Flash NEVER crashes my MacBook Pro. NEVER! I use AIR apps all the time. TweetDeck runs 24 hours a day. Oh, but wait, I don’t use Safari, I use Chrome. Did you ever think it might be Steve Jobs/Apple trying to keep quicktime relevant? Maybe it’s Safari that is the piece of crap.
Seems like it’s more fun to speculate about conspiracy theories than to just, you know, ask a question. I don’t usually monitor the blogosphere for aspersions and theories I need to contradict, sorry, but my email address is on my web page.
Larry and jd is, to put it simply, full of **it.
Adobe is, at this late stage, raising formal objections to – at least – delay the HTML5 standard. They are saying they are not delaying anything but of course they are … think … they are tryung to force re-chartering of the HTML5 group well aware that this will take a long time and lots of discussion.
Why? We all know HTML5 competes with proprietary Adobe technology. And just now they are sensitive and need time to allow the new 10.1 version of Flash to be implemented by mobile phone makers. Which will be harder if the makers see that they can get away out of Adobes grip by just supporting HTML5.
What Adobe really want is to block the Canvas part of HTML5. This is their first goal. The secondary goal is to delay the HTML5 standard by forcing a re-charter and that is why they are attacking the other two documents (RDFa and Microdata).
Is Adobe hindering HTML5′s standards process? I don’t know, but I know they are not in a hurry to implement it in their products either. Adobe has achieved the level of a perceived monopoly with their creative software suites, and flash, and they really act as if they don’t have to move very fast to adopt any new standards.
Just because your CTO goes on the record and says yes, we see where some improvement is needed in this software or that, doesn’t automatically mean they are in a hurry to get to work on it. Have the Creative Suite 4 application updates been rewritten in Cocoa for 64 bit (Mac OSX)? The answer is no, because they don’t have to.
Since there is no credible alternatives to Photoshop and Illustrator they don’t really need to. Adobe sells quite a bit of software to creatives on the Mac platform, and Cocoa has been available for developers for close to a decade. Is it a priority for Adobe to provide their customers with the best, most secure and optimized software? No. As a matter of fact, they responded in 2008 that a 64 bit Cocoa Creative Suite for Mac OS would be too costly to develop, so they are not in a hurry.
So now a guy goes on record saying he’s adamant that Adobe is not slowing down the Standards Process? They have no incentive competitively to support it. An HTML5 standard would threaten Flash. Or at the very least, force Adobe to use resources to improve the product. This is the same as Kevin Lynch saying; oh we’ll fix that flash, but Apple is bad for not using it on iPhone, no matter how bad it may or may not be.
Larry’s comment that members of the W3C working group were “abusing their official positions to grandstand and promote proprietary advantage.” is a strong accusation and could be viewed as counter-productive. If you want to contribute to the HTML standards process why not present your plan, as opposed to just being dismissive and hindering the effort. At the very least, why not offer the source code for Flash available to the W3C as an alternative standard? Have Adobe even upgraded Flash since they bought it? The Application logo is still the same as it was in the old Macromedia days!
Is Adobe an innovative company contributing great software advances for consumers and the enterprise? No. They are just a big complacent company doing whatever and saying whatever they can to protect their monopoly software niche, and their proprietary advantage platform.
Listening to people say that HTML 5 is going to put FLASH out of business is like hearing the idiots tell us that CO2 causes global warming. YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT! Only NON-coders think HTML 5 is a solution for anything. Gee, does it come with a global video codec? NOT.
Sorry. But YOU are the one who doesn’t know what you are talking about. You have not clue and your are mildly put, dumb.
>Gee, does it come with a global video codec? NOT.
Neither is flash a global video codec. Never was, never will be a video codec. It’s a plattform specific plugin that renders animations and video data.
It’s in no way “global” as it is not available for each and every plattform, nor does it work on each plattform the same.
>hearing the idiots tell us that CO2 causes global warming.
You are an idiot. A total, hopeless idiot. People like you are destroying nature and the world, ’cause they don’t WANT to see what’s happening. It’s irresponsible. Just because it is inconvenient, would require a change of your life style or is simply horrible, dumb people like simply ignore it and renounce it. That doesn’t change anything. CO2 does cause global warming (together with CH4, SF6, etc). End of story, end of discussion.
Ahem,….. I also think the great global warming debate about CO2 emissions is a lot of ‘hot air’, but I also agree that Flash has had its day, and I also think the future is in both HTML5 (and nuclear power, not wind or solar!!). There. Put that in your pipe and smoke it! =0)
Quote; “End of story, end of discussion.”
Oh yes, I absolutely detest this kind kind of anti-democratic, neo-fascist green politic. Why can’t we have a debate? “End of story”? “End of discussion”? Are the scientific findings made in stone? “End of discussion”? Why?? The whole point of science is about discussion! There is no such thing as ‘scientific fact’. We are still learning about the world and the universe. How can we as intelligent thinkers, make scientific progress if we are not allowed to discuss our findings?
Global warming is a scam for money just like the “bail-out package” and nearly everything else the pharmaceutical companies and congress do. Al Gore created the internet and the global warming scam. We all need to recycle and limit pollution but the continual lies that are coming out of washington won’t do it. The earth is actually cooling and that trend will continue for the next 40 years. It’s not about global warming you thick headed ape, it’s about the money.
Neither is flash a global video codec. Never was, never will be a video codec. It’s a plattform specific plugin that renders animations and video data.
It’s in no way “global” as it is not available for each and every plattform, nor does it work on each plattform the same.
herpes symptoms
@ Noob 12:52 AM
I’m a coder. Daily, as a matter of fact, in HTML and many other things. I’m pleased to be an exception to your all-knowing, all-encompassing statement that only non-coders think HTML5 is a solution for anything.
Actually, it solves a few things. Have you heard of it’s local database storage? There’s one for ya. Being able to do video and animation without relying on a closed, single-vendor-only solution is a good thing. It means open-source folks can jump in and produce great FOSS solutions for web content creation in the same way they produced things like Open Office and The Gimp.
Also, the fact that it doesn’t “come with” a global video codec is a strength, IMO, rather than a weakness. The codec should not be defined or otherwise ascribed in the HTML spec, but elsewhere, in the same way that PNG, GIF, and JPEG are defined by other bodies. (By the way, the two “contenders” for HTML5 video–Ogg Theora and h.264–both work beautifully on my Mac.)
please read this… http://blog.onebyonedesign.com/?p=421
It’ll be great to return to these types of posts in a few years when Flash Player 15 is still the most popular software on the planet and all you fanboys wished that HTML6 was finally an agreed spec.
Do you live in the real world? Flash plugs today’s internet feature gaps, and will continue to do so for a very long time. Where’s the innovation with HTML5? It does half the things Flash does, and does them badly on a select few browsers.
Get a grip, you know you’re living in a dream world and no amount of Flash hate will get you to your goal any quicker, it’ll just make you look like a prick.
“It does half the things Flash does, and does them badly on a select few browsers.”
If you want to see something ‘done badly’, then try the flash plugin on any platform that isn’t Windows.
Do I need a flash blocker on Windows? No, the flash plugin is coded ok there, but on any other platform, mobile, mac, linux – it’s a steaming heap of crap, peddled so that Adobe can claim ubiquity.
Oh dear, guess it’s time to pull this FUD article then…
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2010Feb/0439.html
Geez, chill out, people. If these were really Adobe guys commenting it’s likely the first and last time they waste their time here.
So much for the pure win of being able to occasionally get replies to your questions/complaints at your favorite Mac news site.
“Idiot global warming hitler neofascist FUD open source obama microsoft jobs steaming gore bush climatology”… Yes, I’m exaggerating, but is it so hard to just reply without immediately starting off using the vilest of fallacies and direct insults
.
… hold it, Godwin’s Law right there….
(Seriously, I appreciate that I’m able to comment here at 9to5mac.com, and that Seth updated the report so quickly.)
jd/adobe
Nice information, I really appreciate the way you presented.Thanks for sharing..
HTML5 is gonna bury flash… unless flash became an HTML tool design ;p
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