Disclaimer: this is an opinion piece. Probably as much as the subject anyways, except that Joe Hewitt wrote Firebug, and is generally known for being awesome, unlike me. So at any rate, I’m from now on allowed to say whatever the fuck I want without linking any evidence because I’m just saying how I feel towards his thoughts.

What’s it about?

Joe Hewitt recently wrote a series of tweets ranting about how the web in general sucks, more or less starting here as far as I can tell. First and foremost, I agree that this whole web pages deal could’ve been done a lot better, so I’m not defending the status quo as a great job. Though I am however saying that when you have tech that is as politicized as HTML, we gotta be thankful that we somehow managed to dig ourselves out of what we got thrown into by a certain company that had an agenda in hindering it as hard as it could, before 2020.

So, tweet by tweet, my thoughts:

Redirect your hatred of Flash to the W3C, whose embarrassingly slow pace forced devs to use a plugin because the standards were so weak.

I sure hope he’s not in favor of those full-page Flash websites still alive around the web. While I agree that portability-wise it was great that you could write once and see it working (almost) everywhere, I fail to recall a single one of those websites that were as nearly as usable as what HTML would give you. I’m specifically talking about bookmarking, back/forward buttons, linking, and forms.

Browser makers need to go nuts with non-standard APIs and let the W3C standardize later. Waiting for the committee to innovate is suicide.

Oh but they do. I’m sure he knows that and meant something else in here.

10 years ago we bullied Microsoft into stopping innovation on IE so the W3C could take over. How’d that work out?

I’m still thinking Joe is awesome, but that’s despite this particular tweet. Their very move against Netscape (heck, Google it, but I just take you all heard the story) shows what happened to what they perceived as a threat. So if anyone did anything, it was making sure we wouldn’t have Internet Explorer as the gateway to the whole interwebs.

For those too young to remember, IE was innovating like crazy from 4.0 -6.0, right up until the DOJ and web standards commies intervened.

I’m not sarcasm impaired, so I’ll ignore commies. Shades of grey right? That’s fine. I believe that apart from working hard to ensure no one would be using anything other than their own browser for the next few decades, they did bring some good stuff in, like XMLHTTPRequest (fuck knows why “XML”, though it had to suck somehow). But is it hard to see how a situation where everyone needs to use your own company’s web browser or else everything looks broken, a bad idea as far as said company can see? Not strictly related to web, but please do check this out.

I want desperately to be a web developer again, but if I have to wait until 2020 for browsers to do what Cocoa can do in 2010, I won’t wait.

and

I am ranting because I want to drop Cocoa and go back to the web, but I am upset about how much power I have to give up to do that.

And I’d love to be able to write HTML/CSS/Javascript for nothing else other than Webkit too. If you’re coming (back, as I understand) from an environment aimed at a certain platform (Cocoa), onto another that’s aimed at working at a number of, then yeah, you’ll be annoyed as hell for having to deal with problems that just don’t exist where consistency is the norm.

Were the standards whatever comes out of the Webkit nightlies and nothing else, you bet we wouldn’t be having this conversation. The point being: you’re comparing the outcomes of software running on one platform versus many. The former will always win, but that’s just not an option when we’re talking about browsers.

I’ve been hard on Flash, but we should all thank Macromedia/Adobe for 10 years of picking up the slack of the W3C, Microsoft, and Mozilla.

I don’t even believe they had the same kind of challenges to begin with. Macromedia for one, despite having ubiquity when it came to adoption of their plugin, they did one hell of a sucky job making it perform well, not crash, and even be portable (who can forget the whole episode of the GNU/Linux Flash player) and more importantly: develop a culture that praised developers for how usable their apps are. I know the tools were there to make it so (for the record, not so much a few years ago) but then what the hell is wrong with these people? Who figured that floating animated menus of 3 layers and bubbles was a good deal for the end user?

I would prefer to see web standards managed the way Python is - in the open, with a “benevolent dictator” who has a coherent vision.

I’d love that too, probably in the short term. Long term, you can rest assured whoever got a hold of it would do what MS did back in the IE days: make damn sure they’re the only one selling tickets to this show.

And final

Things that succeed as standards: TCP/IP, HTTP, URL, XML, JSON, CLI. Things that fail as standards: HTML, CSS, SVG, DOM, JS.

Had Big Government back in the day anticipated we’d be now looking at things like Wikileaks, the music industry and their piracy crusade, political scandals generally making it to the internet way before The Media picks them up, you think at least TCP/IP and HTTP would’ve gotten through unharmed? Namely: geared exclusively towards solving technical problems as they are rather than addressing concerns like “how do we track this person?” or “is this person authorized to publish this content?”.

I just think MS had the foresight and acted on it early. Hence, the mess I admit we are in now.

Another disclaimer

I’m assuming here that a lot of what he said can’t be properly summarized not in 140 characters, not a in a series of. So I’m definitely not having a stab at his persona or his intelligence.