DOM of the Future
November 16, 1998
"Where is this all leading us?" you wonder with heady
glee. Clearly, one of the major themes of this
article has been that the two major Web development
environments -- Netscape and Microsoft's browsers -- do not
share compatible Document Object Models. Whether or not you
believe that they should be compatible at this level
most likely depends on whether you are a developer, a user,
or a shareholder in one of the above stakes.
Supporting the developers are the
W3C,
the standards body of
the Web, who have recently released the official
Document Object Model Level-1
specification. This specification could go a long way to
resolving incompatibilities between
the browsers, but it is no golden cure. For one, W3C
recommendations are only useful if a developer adopts them.
There is no law forcing Microsoft or Netscape to implement
the W3C DOM. Historically, the pattern has been that
both giants will publicly embrace the standard, vaguely
commit to implementing it, and ultimately implement portions
of it while retaining proprietary twists. This is likely
to happen again.
After all, Web development has quickly become much more
programs which actually process data and return results,
in real-time, across the network. It is not difficult
to imagine these distributed applications growing into the
complexity of their local counterparts such as word processors,
spreadsheets, and even games. One consequence of
this will be that the client which distributes and executes
the data -- namely, the "browser" -- strides
ever closer to becoming an operating system. Of course, the
operating system is perhaps the most contested ground
of all these days, as one company dominates the market and
many others want a piece of same pie. Given these realities,
it is difficult to impossible to imagine that competing
companies would adopt strategies that allow for full
cross-compatibility between their development environments.
Perhaps, though, with enough populist pressure -- the true
driving force of the Internet -- compatibilities
can be put into place which ease the major issues facing
developers and users. Competitiveness can be leveraged
on other criteria than proprietary standards -- after all,
there are competing manufacturers of televisions, and
even automobiles, for example, yet all operate to compatible
base standards. Speaking of populist pressure, the
Web Standards Project ("WaSP") is an activist
group of high-end Web developers who support convincing
and/or shaming the Big Two into supporting common web standards,
such as the Document Object Model.
Microsoft: DOM, the Sequel
The Document Object Model Dissected
|
