“Graphics on the Web: Going Beyond Images and Rectangles”

Not every browser vendor has the same interests. Mozilla pushes the boundary on js, Webkit on graphics etc. If you look at it historically, pretty much everything – even CSS and SVG had roots in an implementation before going to the standards body.

Take SVG – it didn’t come from thin air. From wikipedia:
“SVG was developed by the W3C SVG Working Group starting in 1998, after Macromedia and Microsoft introduced Vector Markup Language (VML) whereas Adobe Systems and Sun Microsystems submitted a competing format known as PGML.”

So yes “SVG” was created by the w3c after existing innovations wanted to create a standard. The problem was that Microsoft didn’t want to play ball. It had something already and didn’t want to go with the standards body. Its quite possible that the landscape would be a little different right now if either the w3c had decided to go with VML or if Microsoft had accepted SVG.

Let’s also not forget that specification that came before implementation – CSS3, SVG (specifically SVG as opposed to a vector markup), web forms, have been sitting around without widespread use, while things that exist and become a standard – XHR, Canvas have had much speedier adoption.

As for standards bodies not being places to innovate. Is this the groupthink of the day. Are you basically saying that CSS, SVG, XML etc were all mistakes. Weren’t most of these “innovative” technologies “designed” by standards groups well before viable end user implementations arrived.

When the browsers wars ended, and the winner stopped implementing newer web standards, the W3C became catatonic. They diverted all their attention away from the browser wasteland to the server, and mobiles.

While stuff like contenteditable and ajax came from outside the bodies. They also came with awkward, odd and sometimes illogical APIs. I would much rather see sane content-editable apis included in HTML5 rather than the gibberish that MS randomly came up with.

But OpenGL ES for JavaScript is much better than nothing at all. ;-)

They may be less open than others (notably W3C) during the process, but that doesn’t mean they’re not about building de factor standards (besides, they’re doing this under a royalty-free licence). The W3C co-operated with these guys when they did OpenVG (which is great), and all worked fine.

So it’s completely silly to say that browser vendors have given up on advancing the open web through standards. For one, they’re doing that in W3C right now, but what they do in TKG and in a number of other places (e.g. OMTP) — just because you haven’t heard of them doesn’t mean they’re not building standards — is also that. The open web is being advanced through standards more now than ever, and I think we’ve now more or less figured out the experiment-specify loop in a way that makes the ancient innovation v standardisation debate antiquated.

I can’t think of any technology that has teased a feature as much as the canvas tag; forcing devs to write “myCanvas.getContext(’2d’)” everytime is borderline sadistic!