Web Directions

Standards, innovation, Flash, ownership and all that

• By:John
• Tweet: @johnallsopp
• November 10, 2011
• Leave a response

It’s often argued (well, asserted might be a better way of putting it) that standards are an anathema to innovation, or at the very least a significant impediment to it.

At its most extreme, this is used as an argument for disbanding the W3C, and even for core web technologies to become “a single source repository [with] a good owner to drive it.”

Occasionally history throws up curiously timely experiments. Right now we are seeing a very interesting one (and one with far reaching consequences) play out.

Since the middle to late 18^th Century, with the enclosure of the commons, and the rise of industrial capitalism, the belief that ownership and property rights is what has largely driven advancements in our civilisation has become almost all pervasive. It lies at the heart of the, until relatively recently alien, concept of intellectual property (increasingly seen as a bane not boon for innovation).

So, what does this have to do with the clear demise of Flash on mobile? Flash has an owner. One that had, and continues to have large revenues, teams of very smart people, deep pockets.

Despite all this, Flash failed to adapt to changing technological circumstances, and withered on the vine.

In parallel, core web technologies have slowly, inexorably grown more sophisticated, organically, iteratively, cooperatively adding capabilities that, for the most part developers clearly want and need.

Let’s take an example I used in a recent presentation. The DOM, while powerful, has long been a pain for developers to really get to grips with. Recognizing this, various libraries, and most famously jQuery, came up with more developer friendly ways of accessing it. jQuery’s use of CSS selector concepts proved immediately popular, and in short order, the W3C began work on the Selectors API, while browsers also within a relatively short time frame began implementing this API.

An ownership model is different. The owner of a platform or technology makes strategic decisions, and long term bets on what will be successful. Those bets may of course pay off tremendously (as in the case of iOS). But they may not, and very often do not, as in the case of Flash.

Standards bodies are not imune to the ownership model of development. XHTML2 is a decade long demonstration of that.

Technologies with the ownership model seem less capable of adapting to change, and are very dependent on initial conditions. The cooperative, collaborative standards based approach (characterised best by the IETF’s founding principle of “rough consensus and working code”) often seems to build technologies that weather the storms of technological, social and political change far better.

It’s ironic, that the apparently “capitalist” “ownership” model is really much more like the central planned economic model of former socialist countries, while the W3 model more closely approximates how the societies of economically liberal countries work.

Neither model is going away soon. Each will have its successes and its failures. But I think it is time to put to bed the far too pervasive meme that standards are in some way an impediment to innovation. After all, take a look at the web. Built on standards (TCP/​IP, http, HTML, CSS, EMCMAScript, the DOM), it’s doing ok. Better than OK I’d suggest.

4 responses to “Standards, innovation, Flash, ownership and all that”:

1. • By:Francisc
   • November 10th, 2011
   

   I disagree.

   Flash didn’t fail to adapt and certainly didn’t wither. I also don’t think that Flash is a lost bet (for Adobe probably) considering its lifespan (still alive) and the many use-​​cases it has had, with no other real alternative. Flash wasn’t made big by the marketing department. It was made big by us, by our needs, by the desire to be able to colour outside of the lines and do the undoable.

   I’ll quote Ben Forta: “You see, Flash’s job has always been to pick up where the browser left of, with the understanding that the line between them was a grey and moving one. As HTML and web browsers have evolved and improved, Flash gets to back-​​off from specific use cases, handing them off to the web browser itself, and thereby freeing itself up to tackle the next challenge.”

   Mind that it is only Flash Player plugin for mobile that’s being shut down. Mobile devices don’t suffer from the same plague inherited from the old age of the Internet as the desktop devices.

   Other than that, Flash is very present on mobile devices through Adobe AIR which enables it to run outside of the browser and does so very well. Talking about bets, let’s see how this one goes. I have a feeling it won’t turn out too bad.

2. • By:Christina Habberjam
   • November 11th, 2011
   

   I agree whole-​​heartedly with Francisc. I think all this Flash-​​hate is the true innovation-​​impediment.

3. • By:Richard Fink
   • November 22nd, 2011
   

   John,

   I haven’t as yet digested your entire article, because I got sidetracked by the phrase “enclosure”.

   I’m familiar with the phrase. And you are, of course, simply using an old phrase from the history books. But my concern is that “enclosure” is way too stuffy — academic and arcane — a label for what’s going on. (In other words, nobody’s going to get it.)
   It lacks power. How about “land grab”?

   The monied interests that have managed to turn patent and copyright law into a form of coporate welfare — “Copyright Queens”*, I call them, use much more colorful language to pursue their interests.

   Pirates! Thieves!

   Fire needs to be met with fire.
   The corporate Copyright Queens, who wouldn’t know how to compete in a truly competitive marketplace if their lives depended on it, have framed the issues with vivid and exaggerated language meant to provoke fear and a sense of great and imminent danger.

   Pirates! Thieves!

   Those that oppose the Land Grab need to fight back with rhetoric that’s up to the task.

   I’m workin’ on it. (Uh, you can see I’ve changed my mind about a few things in the course of the past few years.)

   Just sayin’.….

   Regards,

   Richard Fink
   Blog: Readable Web
   Type Director: Kernest/​Konstellations

   *“Copyright Queen” is an allusion to Ronald Reagan’s thinly veiled racist ploy used during his campaign for President in 1980. Reagan’s “welfare queen”, was a mythical fat black female welfare recipient driving around in an expensive car, and living the good life at the expense of the taxpayers.
   As far as the last part — living the good life at the expense of the taxpayers — exactly right on. Hence, “Copyright Queens”.

4. • By:BlueBoden
   • December 23rd, 2011
   

   You can’t really say that proprietary software doesn’t adapt to change, because its often the very thing controlling the change. If for some reason this stops, the free alternatives is just waiting around the corner to pick up where they left.

   Its not just the w3c who has been working slow. Microsoft has also been very lazy, and totally overlooked the potential to push the development of IE, and is not committing other fetal mistakes, such as not supporting new versions on older versions of Windows.

   HTML as a “Living Standard” has the potential to include new features faster than the w3c could dream of currently. They are however still maintaining their own “snapshot” called HTML5, and whats the point? People don’t care about recommendation status, they care about when a feature is safe to use.

   The main problem is that we have yet to reach recommendation status, for features that have been around for years.

   I also wouldn’t bash copyright laws so hard, they are in place for our common good.

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