Users and Standards

In a comment an an earlier blog post, I was asked about users and the effect of different kinds of standards on users -- I had talked about the effect of standards on implementors but not about end users. The commenter made some claims about what end users wanted, with reference (presumably) to users of browsers.

This is hard, so I might take a couple of whacks at it, but here's one pass....

What Users Want


My main point is that what users want varies a lot, and that making a standard that was good for "users" involves making tradeoffs.

• Even a single user wants different and somewhat contradictory things. A single user wants both innovation and stability -- for new features, but also for old features to continue to work somehow. Just optimizing that alone involves a lot of tradeoffs.

• Second, there are different categories or roles of users. I'm a writer-user publishing this blog, and you (dear reader) are a reader-user. Although both roles may desire communication, sometimes the desires of the writer and the reader conflict. For example, writers often want readers to also see ads, while readers would just as soon skip the ads. To benefit both the needs and wants of both roles users requires some trade-offs.

• Third, even within a single role, there are variations. For example, among writer-users, some care about ads, some care about exact presentation, some care only about readers who have particular technology, or are running the latest software. Some care about users with accessibility needs and, unfortunately, others don't.

• Fourth, there are other applications, software, and work-flows those users might engage in (for example, copying web pages into email, reposting them in news feeds) and the user needs and wants may vary based on interoperability needs outside of the context of the user role in this individual action.

• Fifth, there are vendors who have different subsets of users who are important to them, based on their business model, and what other activities those vendors also support. As the business model varies (e.g., between selling advertising linked with uniquely provided services, closed hardware platforms combined with content monetization, or tooling and infrastructure), this influences which users, workflows, roles, and associated compatibility issues are important to the vendors who are implementing the standards. And vendors don't want impossible implementation goals in order to meet their user's needs. While you might not care about the desires of the vendors, motivating them is what causes standards to be implemented.
• Finally, it's important to think not only about needs now but also in the future. Do the standards allow sufficient evolution that new reader technology will work well with old content, while old readers continue to work with new content? Has the standard provided for a clean path for future extensibility?

What makes good standards for those users?

The standards, the specifications, and the discussions around them require a very difficult balance between all of these ultimately user-driven factors.

Given all of this, a standard for the web should try to meet all these needs, not just some. While some end users indeed want "a browser that work on any web site they pick", that would also mean supporting ActiveX, Java, QuickTime, and the five-letter F word.

Those who are designing and coding web sites have complex needs (some motivated by "money"), butthe link to technical requirements is not very simple.

A publisher can't depend on anything being broadly implemented just because some spec says a browser MUST do something. A MUST in a specification isn't a law; it provides no push. The only role a MUST in standard actually has is to provide a check-box for implementations; if the vendor of the implementation says "I implement standard X", they mean, among other things, "I follow every MUST in the spec, and I also follow every SHOULD except when I have a good reason not to, which I can explain". That's it. That's all the standard really does, is give you something to measure against.


A good standard is one where MUST and SHOULD are used as sparingly as possible; only those things that are really necessary to accomplish interoperability in the simple sense that the roles (readers and writers, intermediaries, editors, transformers) can function with expected results. Not necessarily the same results, but within the range of expectation.

HTML5 "experiment" and W3C Priorities

HTML5 W3C

in yet another astounding revelation, here's another post, again to the W3C secret Member-Only w3c-ac-forum cabal's list. Since this is my blog, I can repost all this historical stuff, right? Of course, this was a while ago, in the context of W3C budget discussions, and before there was even the (buggy!) HTML working group "Decision Policy".

---

From: Larry Masinter <masinter@adobe.com>
Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2008 15:18:29 -0700
To: "w3c-ac-forum@w3.org"

My personal observation is that the current HTML5 process combines the worst elements of the IETF process and the W3C process. From the IETF, there is the chaos of an open mailing list, wide ranging comments and free participation, but without the "adult supervision" that the IETF supplies in the form of the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) and the area directors. From the W3C, there is the overhead and cost of W3C activity management and staff, and a process that assumes that voting members actually have a say in the final specification, but without any actual responsibility or response to normal W3C safeguards and cross-checks.

Recall the original history of HTML standardization: it started in the IETF, but succumbed there to an irresolvable debate between "inline font tags" vs "style sheets". The move to W3C was to provide a more structured environment, and strong enough management to resolve the ongoing positioning by Netscape and Microsoft.

At this point, the players have changed and there are more of them, but the jockeying for position is ongoing, but W3C seems to have abdicated any responsibility for ensuring that comments get answered, that questions are addressed on their technical merits, that reasonable voices are considered and points of view addressed, even when they differ from the point of view of the current editor of the document.

The W3C process document was built to safeguard the process. If there is an 'experiment' and the experiment is going awry, then the experiment shouldn't continue in its current form.

My basic premise for W3C prioritization is that the expansion of W3C activities outside the core of the web, in an attempt to gather more members, has basically been counter-productive, because activities have a lifetime beyond the interest of the few incremental members attracted. The basic direction I would suggest is to trim staff and expenses, and refocus the remaining staff on the core fundamentals of the web. Yes, some special interests may leave if their projects are no longer being developed by W3C, but the W3C process has a heavy overhead which was designed for a much narrower scope. Even if the peripheral activities seem like they're self-funding, every new topic stretches the ability of staff, TAG, Advisory Board, and ultimately the Director to understand and manage the process.

HTML5 and W3C Focus (10/2008)

HTML5,HTML,W3C,web standards

I sent the email below to the W3C members-only mailing list w3c-ac-forum@w3.org on 14 October 2008, as part of a discussion about HTML management. It might be a little dated, but maybe it will explain a bit where I'm coming from.

Note added 2/28/2010:

By “the expansion of W3C activities outside the core of the web” I did not mean style sheets, video, 2D or 3D graphics, HTTP, URLs and all the various URL schemes, web security, which are all at the core of the web. Web applications too! But of the W3C list of activities and publications, some are pretty far away from the "core of the web" as most know "the web", and even if relevant and visionary, but they're not on the trajectory of "the web" as it is being deployed.

"Leadership is the skill of getting others to follow": get out in front, but not so far in front they can't see you, and certainly not chasing after them with waggling fingers.

---

From: Larry Masinter
To: w3c-ac-forum@w3.org
Subject: HTML5 and W3C Focus
Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2008 23:47:15 -0700

To make some progress on the HTML5 situation, I think it's important to look at the general principles of standards-making, and not get too focused on the specifics of the individuals and their personalities. Certainly, just changing the players without addressing the process issues isn't constructive.

Good standards are hard and take time. Many people are frustrated with the standards process and would like to short-circuit the procedures, especially when the official process yields a specification which doesn't address their needs (as happened with XHTML). Many standards efforts do not succeed because the process of developing the specification ignored the needs of critical constituents in the effort to get "something" soon.

The web has many constituents, not just browser implementors. These include end users who depend on the web functioning smoothly and interoperably, but also authors, makers of authoring tools, dynamic web content generation tools, search engines, machine translation services, content management systems, advertisers, IT managers concerned with web security, publishers, government agencies wanting to publish information on the web that is universally accessible, publishers supporting multi-lingual information, gateways and translators to and from web content to print, etc., etc.

The design of HTML matters to each of those constituents, and changes that favor one category may adversely impact another; for example, the more expressive something is, the harder it is to analyze or translate.

Any single individual (editor or chair) may be committed to giving everyone a fair hearing, but it is impossible for any one person to comprehend all of the requirements and the impact that any change or addition might have to the web on all of those constituents. It is inevitable that they internalize the requirements of those they talk to the most, depending on their organization and place in it. With a complex, highly structured, and interdependent technology, it is unreasonable to expect that a small set of individuals who mainly represent a subset of one constituent ("browser implementors primarily concerned with new mobile platforms") to fully carry out the analysis and design work without substantial additional review.

Making changes or additions to HTML, and encouraging content creators to use additional features where universal acceptance is not likely is irresponsible, because it fragments the web, and encourages creation of content which only works for some people and not others. The chaos of the browser wars between Microsoft and Netscape was very damaging, and recovery is not yet complete; we should work to avoid a repeat.

Allowing a small specialized design committee to proceed without substantial oversight loses sight of all of the rest for whom the W3C is supposed to serve as guardian of the Web. Additionally, others who are not of the inner circle and who come to the process are at a disadvantage, because it's often difficult to articulate their requirements in a context that is understood by the design committee. Often proposed solutions don't entirely fit and are easy to ignore because the motivation is poorly understood.

Standards processes and standards organizations need staff and mechanisms to ensure that other voices from other constituents are heard clearly, that requirements are exposed and considered, that designs are not just reviewed after the fact, but that review comments are given sufficient discussion to expose the underlying requirements and to understand more clearly whether there is some way of meeting them, even if the offered solution isn't accepted.

In my experience, one of the most challenging tasks in standards-making was to push "proposed solutions" back to "requirements". Very often, someone would make a suggestion for some fix or patch or change they wanted to the specification. They were often unable (or, in some cases, for proprietary reasons, unwilling) to articulate the requirements or needs they were trying to satisfy by the proposed feature. Much of the difficult work was to distill these requirements and prioritize them, make them explicit, and explore alternative solutions.

Transparency in the standards process (e.g., a chart of suggestions ignored by the HTML5 editor) might help a little, but what's needed is a more thorough analysis of the requirements and evaluation of the specification against requirements in a neutral way. Doing so is a distinguishing characteristic which would differentiate an open and consensus driven standards organization from a consortia or a company producing proprietary solutions.

As W3C examines its budget priorities, I believe that the only proper response to both the W3C financial crisis (as well as the dissatisfaction with prominent ongoing activities such as HTML5) is to look harder at the organization's priorities. An effective W3C is one in which W3C can provide technical management. Technical management of a standard involves more than just making sure the meetings are held on time and that there are minutes. The W3C organization needs to provide leadership that reflects its mission statement: Leading the Web to Its Full Potential. The implicit assumption is that it is the full potential for all, not a small subset. The management team, staff, TAG and other important controls of the W3C process should be sufficiently focused not only on the technical aspects of the specifications being developed, but also on the impact the specification has on the broader range of constituencies, even when those constituencies are not directly engaged in the process. The structure of W3C process and technical oversight - director, TAG, staff - have intrinsic limits as to the scope of activities that can be effectively managed.

Many of the other core specifications which underlie the web (beyond HTML) are also in need of maintenance. In the IETF, the HTTP specification is being updated to correct errors and clarify ambiguities, yet this effort has received scant W3C attention. The URI specifications have several areas which need clarification and further standardization work (the "file:" URI comes to mind), yet there is no motivation or effort to fix the potholes - everyone is focused on building bridges, with the hope that some day they might lead somewhere.

I'm calling for more focus of W3C staff on the core specifications which are of critical interest to the broadest constituencies. To do this and stay within budget implies a drastic retrench of the current W3C activities, even at the expense of driving a number of activities outside of the W3C.

Over-specification is anti-competitive

HTML5

If there are 300 implementations of a specification, all different, but you take the 4 "important implementations" and write a specification that is precise enough to cover what those 4 "important implementations" do, exactly, precisely, and normatively require
("MUST") that behavior, then you inevitably wind up of making many of the remaining 296 implementations non-conforming, because the MUST requirements are too stringent.
The process then favors the 4 "important implementations" over the 296 other ones, and makes it harder for any of them to be offered as compliant implementations.
This is an example of "structural bias", as I wrote about earlier.

This problem is widespread in the HTML specification, and unfortunately really difficult to eliminate.
The example where I explored this in depth was in the calculation of "image.width" and "image.height", where a precise algorithm that required a state transition from:
[image not available, not loaded] to [image available, being loaded]
and then to EITHER [ image available, completely loaded] OR [ image not available, load failed].
HTML5 requires if the image is "available" (whether "being loaded"
or "completely loaded") that both image.width and image.height were both non-zero.
This behavior, I was assured, was necessary because there was some (how much? how often? still deployed?) javascript code that relied on exactly this state transition behavior.
Another implementation, which did not cache image width and height, or which let the cached image.width and height expire, and thus would allow [image available, being loaded] to transition to [image not available, not loaded], but that would be non-compliant with the HTML spec.
This non-compliance is not justified by significant interoperability considerations. It's hard to imagine any reasonable programmer making any such assumptions, and much more likely that the requirement is imaginary. By putting "compatibility" with a few, rare occurrences of badly written software which only works with a few browsers as the primary objective of HTML5, the result is an impenetrable mess.
The same can be said for most of the current HTML spec. It is overly precise, in a way that is anti-competitive, due to the process by which it was written; however, it is not in the business interests of the sponsors of the self-selected "WHATWG" steering committee to change the priorities.
Much was written about the cost of reverse engineering and how somehow this precise definition increased competition by giving other implementors precise guidelines for what to implement, but those arguments don't hold water. The cause of "reverse engineering" is and always has been the willingness of implementors to ignore specifications and add new, proprietary and novel extensions, or to modify behavior in a way that is "embrace and pollute" rather than "embrace and extend". This was the behavior during Browser Wars 1.0 and the behavior continues today.
None of the current implementations of HTML technology were written by first consulting the current specification (because the spec was written following the implementations rather than vice versa) so we have no assurance whatsoever that the current specification is useful for any implementation purpose other than proving that a competitive technology is "non-compliant."

Trip to Shikoku after IETF in Hiroshima

In front of hotel in Matsuyama.

After IETF meeting in Hiroshima, I took the weekend to do a little sightseeing. I stayed at a hotel with traditional Japanese rooms, in a town with an famous old hot springs, the Dogo Onsen.

Platform architecture: orthogonality of interfaces

Over at the TAG (Web archtecture)  blug I posted an essay that wasn't even discussed at the TAG meeting I'm at. Bad form? Presumption? Undemocratic? I suppose. Take a look.

Democracy, the oracle, and the W3C TAG

Athenian treasury at Delphi
Originally uploaded by Larry

Recently on a travel/study cruise focused on ancient Greece and the classics, we toured the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, from which the Delphic oracle spoke.

When does someone consult the oracle? I carry a pocket oracle: an iPhone "Magic 8-Ball" application which I consult at times, usually when I can't make up my mind, but don't want to waste any more time thinking about the decision.

Did the ancients also consulted the oracle when the course of action wasn't clear? Having weighed the pros and cons, the choices seem balanced. But often making some decision is imperative.

In a tyranny, the tyrant can decide. But if there is a group decision process and a need for agreement, then sometimes some external force is still needed to help the group come to a timely conclusion. Even if the ancients couldn't agree on a decision, they could agree to consult the oracle, and the oracle's pronouncements could then be used as justification for the ultimate decision.

The treasuries at the Delphi site impressed me; they were large constructs to hold treasures given as gifts to the gods who provided help in deciding important issues. The treasuries at the Delphi site clearly represent a community contribution, a kind of endorsement, sign, of the oracle as an authority.

The W3C TAG is an Architecture Group to which I was elected. The W3C TAG produces "findings" -- readings of general principles for the World Wide Web. Our pronouncements might be used as justification one way or another to encourage consensus, in those cases where otherwise reasonable participants cannot come to a conclusion on a course of action, but where a coming to a decision is important. Standards are often about making difficult choices. Let Sir Pythia speak, and we Delphic priests will interpret (alas, not in elegant hexameter).