Microsoft’s involvement in the HTML 5 working group

I recently joined the w3c HTML 5 working group (anyone can). One of the things being discussed initially was who would be the co-chairs of the group. Chris Wilson of the Internet Explorer team was one of the folks discussed a lot, and I immediately put together this email:

As a web developer and someone who cares very passionately about the web, I must say the idea of Microsoft involvement on this WG, especially in a co-chair capacity, bothers me.

I expect that a majority of the people on this list would agree that Microsoft, and IE in particular, have held the web back for the past decade.

I do not mean this as a personal criticism of anyone on this list, or even of the IE dev team. I understand that market forces, software engineering constraints, and many other variables of which I am not aware, are involved in IE’s pathetic featureset and development cycles. (Chris has a very tough job, and is doing it better than I could).

But: I do think it would be appropriate for Microsoft to explicitly identify their purpose for involvement in this WG. Presumably it is to help develop a standard…

Do they then intend to implement this standard?

I wish that question sounded funny.

Why give Microsoft a voice on a standards development effort, when they have yet to implement several other years-old, painstakingly-designed standards that we all think are important, and that HAVE been implemented by several other projects with significantly fewer resources?

Which, as you can see if you go look at the archives, generated essentially no discussion.

Then, a few weeks later, Safari developer Maciej Stachowiak posted an email expressing similar concerns. In fact, his was much more bold than mine. In fact, in the eyes of many IE-hating Microsoft apologists (and there are many), it was downright undiplomatic. However, I feel that every word is true and relevant, and overall the email is brilliantly put together, straight from the heart of a software engineer who loves the web:

On Apr 8, 2007, at 6:01 PM, Chris Wilson wrote:

> Lachlan Hunt [mailto:lachlan.hunt@lachy.id.au] wrote:
>> Chris Wilson wrote:
>>> Yes, we will require opt-ins to turn on “really really” standards
>>> mode in future versions of IE.
>>
>> I do not understand. The intention of HTML5 is for it to be
>> defined in
>> a way that *is* compatible with the web. And assuming that is the
>> case,
>> you will be able to implement it because it will not significantly
>> break
>> compatibility. This is in part because much of the processing
>> requirements were based reverse engineering IE, Firefox, Opera and
>> Safari. If there is something in the spec that will significantly
>> break
>> compat, then we can revise the spec based on implementation
>> experience.
>
> Opera, Safari and Firefox do not bug-for-bug repeat IE’s mistakes.

Not all of them - only the ones that web content has come to depend on without IE-specific targeting.

>
> Knock yourself out. To us that’s the current behavior of IE, and
> we cannot change it no matter how wrong it may be (and in some
> cases, it’s quite provable wrong)*. I’d like to build an IE that
> accepts standard content, and handles it according to the spec -
> which will allow all UAs to have the same behavior. Unless we have
> some way to identify that content, we will not be able to change,
> and then we will have to make “the spec” mirror precisely what IE7
> does. I think that would be an awful spec, and I’d rather create a
> better future.

Just to be clear - which of the following conclusions would be correct to draw from your statements:

1) IE does not intend to ever fix any content-handling bugs relative to IE7 without some explicit opt-in (so current web content that does not add the right opt-in trigger will always render exactly as in IE7).

2) IE does not intend to ever add new features (elements, attributes, APIs, JS language features, CSS selectors, CSS properties, whatever) relative to IE7 without some explicit opt-in, even if such support would not break known web content.

3) Not only will IE not fix current bugs or add features without opt- in, but for all future standards that IE supports, at some point you will stop fixing bugs and lock in the then-existing behavior of IE as a new quirks mode. So, for example, assuming IE10 supports HTML5, IE11 won’t fix any bugs in HTML5 support or add any features you missed and no more changes will be made until HTML6 is out.

#1 and #2 would be troubling enough — but even a single post-HTML4 doctype (like as proposed by Web Apps 1.0) would enable adding a single new quirks mode switch.

But if #3 is the case, then you are effectively announcing that IE does not ever plan to conform to any standard this working group comes up with. At some point, a given set of bugs will be frozen. And IE will not document these differences and ask for errata to the spec, they will just remain an IE-specific set of arbitrary differences.

I hope #3 does not apply, because that would make Microsoft’s participation in this Working Group appear to be in bad faith. Normally implementors participate in Working Groups to negotiate a standard they can all reasonably implement. In the end, everyone compromises for the greater benefit of interoperability.

Saying up front that you will never be conformant seems to me like an unfair way to approach this process. After all, if HTML5 called for something that was exceedingly impractical to implement, it wouldn’t really matter to Microsoft - that can just be a future quirk. But other browser vendors, who do intend to keep improving conformance, would have to either struggle with it or get the spec changed. Given this disparity, it is hard to see how fair compromises could be negotiated.

So, once again, I really hope that #3 is not something you mean to imply by your remarks. While feedback from a vendor who does not intend to conform to the standard may be somewhat interesting, it should not be given the same weight, I think, as feedback from vendors who do intend to conform.

To be fair, it’s probably the case that no existing browser has 100% conformance to any web standard. But for Safari at least, we fix conformance bugs regularly. And if we discover that something in a web standard significantly breaks web content, we try to get it changed. I believe this is the case for Mozilla and Opera as well. I think this is a very different stance from deciding to have an arbitrary undocumented set of deviations from the spec that are not fed into the standards process.

Sincerely,
Maciej

Maciej’s email generated much more of a response than mine including an initial response from Chris Wilson promising a statement on the matter, and said statement several days later.

I actually haven’t been keeping up with the discussion, there are dozens of emails a day on that list. But I just wanted to point out this little bit of Geek Drama that’s been going on, and also that I was first.

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