These days it’s always Google-this and Google-that, and of course I appreciate all the cool stuff they do – but other people do great things too, and in this case it’s even another search engine company: Yahoo has released a new version of their Yahoo User Interface library (covered in their blog here, download and documentation is here). I haven’t used YUI for serious projects, because I rarely do something like rich interface applications and I do not like to include large libraries when it’s not strictly necessary. But I played around with the examples enough to say that’s it cool and useful and well documented, so if you need an animation framework or DOM utilities or controls from color picker to rich text editor or a JS/Flash hybrid charts widget or JSON utilities.. well you see it’s a pretty complete list. And apropos of nothing I include here again a link to Christian Heilmanns website – he works for Yahoo and is testing the YUI lib for the european market, and besides he has as always a number of good blog posts on JS that are helpful for javascript developement even if you don’t plan to use this library (or any library).

Also on the YUI blog I found a presentation by Douglas Crockford who was talking about The State of Ajax -and the news isn’t good, or to put it more precisely there aren’t actually any news. At one point he shows a recent graphics demo by Nvida with a voluptuous young mermaid and says “now we look at this from the viewpoint of a web developer – look, rounded corners!” (the audience laughs). The point he brings home quite successfully is that after years and years and years of web developement we still have nothing – we don’t have a good architecture for applications, we don’t have good tools for presentation ( we have CSS and that looks more like a half-assed stop gap measure) , we have no standards (actually there are a lot of standards which amounts to the same thing as having none, and the more elaborate they get the more useless they are) and we do not have flashy graphics with voluptuous young mermaids, unless we choose to clog the tubes with megabytes of pixel information. What we have instead is browsers as a working environment, and we as web developers are limited to the things browsers can do. And – so argues Crockford – we are pretty much at the limit of what browsers can do, and they cannot do very much. The last big improvement was the XHTTPRequest, and that is already some five years old.

So what would be the alternative? Well, browsers that work with open, um, “standards” like HTML and CSS could be replaced by slick proprietary applications. For one that could solve the update problem – people who hesitate to download 10 oder 30 or 50 MB of updates to get a recent browser might be easier convinced to download a 1 MB or 2 MB application. And that application could have a tight security model, a smart vector graphics engine, native video capability, you could do real typography instead of { Verdana, Times, damn-I-have-to-use-an-image-for-this }, and possibly you could integrate some useful stuff right into the programme (a native ecommerce-engine? should be doable).

Sounds cool, eh? So let’s get rid of HTML and install Adobe Flash oder MS Silverlight, or…

Or maybe not. Maybe we should take a step back and remember why we’ve put up with open standards so far and why they made the web the success it undoubtly is.

Open Standards preserve – XML is often scolded because it is such a clumsy format, but there are no technical hurdles to open a XML file, or the eminently more usable (for data exchange on the web, that is) JSON format, or an HTML file. Proprietary formats become apocryphical in less time than it takes you to look up “apocryphical” inWikipedia, but HTML will be readable as long as people can open plain text files. Mankind is already destroying it’s own history at a furious rate by comitting it to perishable media like DVDs and the like, and I for one do not feel a need to contribute to this by burying information in proprietary code.

Open standards enable – A proprietary format needs an authoring enviroment, which possibly needs expensive training if you ever want to do better than mediocre and it could be tied to a propietary server technology. And of course a better security model could also mean more restrictions (how about a browser that refuses to download audio files without DRM?). On the other hand I still can do an HTML page in any text editor – I did my first “commercial” website with notepad (in exchange for an decommissioned Apple Performa). I learned PHP and Java by downloading the software and playing aroung until I got the hang of it (and of course I was running the apache webserver). I habitualy use open source software in my projects that is built on open standards. Open standards enabled me to make a living without paying a lot of licence and training fees up in advance, and they enable people who can’t or don’t want to afford my services to do their own stuff.

Open standards connect – I’m currently blogging about software Yahoo gives away for free (because they think it improves their image, or because they think better software helps their business, or maybe simply because they like the idea of sharing). I’m doing it with a software that is built on open standards. I have in my mailbox messages from people from the US and France and, of all places, Mongolia who ask about a piece of software I wrote. Turns out the browser is only a part a part of our working environment, the other part is what’s usually called the “community”. If you do proprietary software you have to keep secrets – but people who work with open standards talk to each other all the time. True, very few people actually manage to push the limits, but merely spreading the word is also a way to contribute. I learned more about web developement from some web guy I’ve met in an pub than I ever learned from all standard documents of the World Wide Web Consortium.

So yeah, browsers suck. But there are some good reasons for this HTML/CSS stuff, even if instead of voluptuous mermaids mere rounded corners are the current pinnacle of web graphics design. What we (as web developers) now have to do is to turn these reasons into advantages for our customers and thus into money for us. I’m sure this works somehow; I wouldn’t be here if it didn’t.