Taking a glance at the history of HTML5

29/6/2017 Dr. Raúl Tabarés

#EURAS2017 Berlin

Index

Introduction The Social Construction of HTML5

The origins of HTML5

The everlasting impact of HTML5

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New features Conclusions

• During the last years the Web has experienced a great transformation due to the growing

ecosystem of multimedia platforms that has been pushed since the advent of Web 2.0

paradigm (O´Reilly, 2005).

Multimedia user-generated content (J Van Dijck, 2009; García-De-Torres, 2010; OECD,

2007; Petersen, 2008; Ritzer & Jurgenson, 2010) has been common nowadays and has

provoked dramatic transformations in the business models that are used by the major

players at the digital landscape (Fuchs, 2010, 2015). At the same time, the widespread

diffusion of mobile devices has also fostered an app ecosystem.

HTML5 is a new web standard finally concluded in 2014 (W3C, 2014) that has added

significant technological capabilities to the structure of the World Wide Web towards a

much-more embedded, flexible and ubiquitous techno-social platform.

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Introduction

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• The birth of HTML5 constitutes a major turning point in the development of Web standards. In June 2004, at a workshop on Web Applications and Compound Documents hosted by the W3C, several developers from Opera Software and the Mozilla Foundation formed the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WhatWG) independently of the W3C (Franganillo, 2010). At the event, Opera and Mozilla professionals presented the vision they had at the time of the future of the Web, which could be summed up as follows: “To transform HTML4 into a standard capable of including new features for modern web application developers” (Pilgrim, 2010). They also stressed the importance of the 7 principles that informed their proposal (The Mozzilla Foundation & Opera Software, 2004): Backwards Compatibility, clear migration path Well-defined error handling Users should not be exposed to authoring errors Practical use Scripting is here to stay Device-specific profiling should be avoided Open process

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The origins of HTML5

• The reason for setting up the group was the disagreement regarding the W3C’s vision of standards. In the eyes of the WhatWG, the W3C’s approach was too academic. However, the W3C appeared to be seeking a replacement for HTML from among various technologies, particularly XHTML 2.0 (O´Mara, 2012). Two years after the workshop, XHTML2 was languishing while the new features of HTML raised high expectations. This fact was combined with criticism of the W3C’s slow progress and little concrete results (Castro, 2007). That´s why Tim Berners-Lee and the W3C announced in October 2006 that they would be working together with the WhatWG to develop HTML further (Berners-Lee, 2006). In October 2009, the W3C dismantled the XHTML2 working group (Le Hegaret, 2009) and abandoned activities in this language in order to concentrate its efforts on developing HTML5. In the following years, browsers began to support HTML5 (Mozilla Firefox was the first to take the plunge) and a phase of raising awareness about this technology started.

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The origins of HTML5

HTML5 is a group of technologies and not a single technology. Several dynamic elements have been introduced as “tags” that are able to reshape the Web environment and its contents. HTML5 also specifies how errors should be interpreted. This puts an end to the recurrent “Browser Wars” that have existed in the digital landscape for how faults should be addressed (Andersson, 2007; Keith, 2010). This new standard also includes new semantic elements to build and to enrich the Web document presentation. Some of them are; article, header, hrgroup, nav, section, aside and footer. In the development of these new tags blogs have had a great influence (Schafer, 2010). Blogs have also created the need to establish a chronology for organizing the news in the webpages which has been a major innovation in how information is displayed on the Web. The most innovative features of HTML5 lie in its multimedia elements. Many of them have been created after tough controversies and the release of proprietary codecs (Linder, 2013, Schonfeld, 2010) Some of them are; Audio, Canvas, Geolocation, Local Storage, Offline Web Applications, Video, Web Forms – Input Types, Web Workers.

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New features

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HTML4

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HTML5

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Result of the most popular names of DIV class founded in the Web. Source: Google

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The Social Construction of HTML5

WHATWG decided to abandon W3C in order to develop a much more pragmatic and interactive version of HTML instead of adopting the academic vision of the W3C which was oriented to the processing and automatization of web documents by machines. Some authors have also coined this kind of disagreements as a period of “interpretative flexibility” (Bijker, Hughes, & Pinch, 1987; Bijker & Pinch, 1984) where different “relevant social groups” build up their own meanings that they are temporarily held till the dominant paradigm imposes to the rest and puts an end to the clash. The making of HTML5 standard has been clearly shaped by the ideas of this particular group of interest. The group of professionals from Mozilla, Opera and later on Apple has been one of the main reasons for setting up the WHATWG and developing the new hypertext standard outside of the W3C working groups according to their ideas and values. They were successful in testing the waters from the community of web developers and at the same time imposing their vision upon the W3C. This pragmatic approach focused on developing web applications and guaranteeing backwards compatibility. These needs were also demanded by commercial interests that the new digital business models based on the economy attention (Goldhaber, 1997) have spread into the Web but also by a great need of simplifying coding techniques.

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The Social Construction of HTML5

Different communication campaigns have been developed in order to spread the benefits of HTML5 and several companies (Leider, 2015; Slideshare, 2011), institutions (Berners-Lee, 2006), famous individuals (Jobs, 2010; Laningham, 2006) and other stakeholders have been involved to publicly support this new standard. The W3C led several efforts for fostering the social diffusion of HTML5 and strengthen its branding in order to show how this new hypertext standard can have a much broader impact than their predecessors. We have to remember that if an innovation is not accepted and adopted by the general public it won´t be a successful one (Echeverría, 2013) and it won´t have an economic impact (OECD, 2005). In the SCOT model this is also known as “rhetorical closure” and recognizes that when the social groups acknowledge that they have found an answer to a problem, they start to talk about how this solution meets the previous requirements. The development of this new hypertext standard have tried to redefine an existing problem with a new user oriented and agile approach and towards a new consensus.

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The everlasting impact of HTML5

The rising of HTML5 has introduced different innovations into the hypertext structure that have paved the way for a much more dynamic standard but at the same time these features have tried to tackle some of the big problems that Web 2.0 paradigm has introduced into HTML standardization. With the advent of Web 2.0 technologies and the explosion of different platforms like blogger, Flickr, MySpace, Facebook and many others, a new kind of user generated content platforms (García-De-Torres, 2010; OECD, 2007; Ritzer & Jurgenson, 2010) have been spoiled. HTML5 has delivered several innovations that have put the basis for the next generation of Web standards . An emphasis has been put in multimedia content and interactive technologies.

Does HTML5 development means a significant change in the way that Web standards are made? Web standardization at W3C is usually based on two dynamics; internal working groups and external contributions. The novelty lies in how the WHATWG critically questions the outputs produced by the W3C working groups and promote a need-gathering of end-users in order to develop “real-world requirements” (Jakobs, Procter, & Williams, 2001) . Previous versions of HTML were led by concrete interests of standardization by private companies in order to develop specific languages ,functionalities or features that can help them to increase their market share but these actions were not based in explicit needs that were demanded by users. In this sense, we can argue that HTML5 has adopted a user-innovation approach (Von Hippel, 1998, 2005). The “Living Standard” has stimulated agile means to standardize useful elements without entangling in long and tedious processes of deliberation and consensus. It has made room for experimentation and test functionalities demanded by users safeguarding the stability of the Web specifications at the same time (Gutiérrez, 2016).

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HTML5 as a “living standard”

This “Living Standard” contains “aspirational elements” or features that browsers haven´t yet implemented but have attracted so much interest from the community of technology users (browser vendors, web designers, etc.). This space provides some room for experimentation and allows refining the characteristics that will be finally implemented or discarded in the final specification delivered by the W3C. These specifications are continuously updated as they receive feedback from the different interested parties for keeping specifications a little ahead of the implementations but not so far ahead that the implementations give up. A significant effort is place to converge specifications and implementations and for providing maturity and stability to the final features that will be displayed by the browsers. This is a significant social innovation that tries to prevent the problems and lack of consensus that have been present since the beginning of the “browser wars” (Tabarés-Gutiérrez, 2015). Internet standardization communities are not famous only by introducing technological innovations but also for pioneering organizational innovations (Russell, 2006, 2014). These kind of new procedures, behaviors or patterns are the result of “constantly dealt with problems that stemmed from the tension between centralized authority and grassroots initiatives, as well as the rising influence of commercial values” (p9, Russell, 2006).

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HTML5 as a “living standard”

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Living Standard

• As previous hypertext standards, HTML5 is also Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) that can be freely used for developing websites or modifying existing ones. FLOSS is a paradigmatic element of the new digital commons (Estalella, Rocha & Lafuente, 2013) because it has supported the development of many famous collaborative projects . The Web does not belong to any particular company and no single company can close this platform. The Web is part of modern digital commons and their standards too and that have made possible that a vast number of companies, organizations and users can add their contributions to the development of this platform. The rising of HTML5 has been due to a significant crisis in the development of Web standards. The proliferation of proprietary software for embedding multimedia elements in webpages (mainly Flash) had provoked major problems in the standardization of multimedia elements (Gutiérrez, 2016), especially, with the popularization of mobile devices and their specific computing requirements. The paradigm of “Web as platform” were called into question and the rising of HTML5 represents a new sort of digital commons that have strengthen the technological basis of the Web for facing the growing presence of proprietary software and meet at the same time the requirements that novel kind of UGC websites have raised into the web development paradigm.

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Digital Commons

“Browser wars” have been common in the history of the Web (Gutiérrez, 2012) but HTML5 has highlighted the importance of open and collaborative schemes in the process of standardization. Commercial interests have introduced different episodes of chaos (Gutiérrez, 2012) that HTML5 wanted to tackle for creating a common technical ground. Collaborative open source projects like “Chromium” opened new processes of collaboration between browser vendors and other players in order to create common technological resources that can bridge different platforms and devices. Mobile devices have created a growing fragmentation and greater complexity that makes so difficult that a single company can occupy a dominant position as it was in the past with IE (Gutiérrez, 2012). An increasing number of companies, industries and countries are involved in the digital economy (Fuster-Morell, 2013). Firms like Yandex, Baiyu, Weibo and many others are also betting on HTML5 too (McKenzie, 2013) and stressing at the same time the multicultural approach of Web standards. Of course new “browser wars” are being conducted but not in critical parts of the standard. Mobile and multimedia technologies have created new battlefields to attract attention (Goldhaber, 1997) but far from the pillars of the standard. This multi-device approach has stressed the importance of values like ubiquity, mobility and interoperability embedded in the standard.

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Putting an end to the “Browser Wars”?

• HTML5 as a new approach to develop Web standards in order to test the waters from the Web development community and applying at the same time a lean methodology to standardization processes for avoiding the growing bureaucracy and academic focus of the W3C working groups. Pragmatism attitude oriented to backwards compatibility, open processes, web applications, stakeholder involvement and agile methods. Market ideology has also prevailed once more time throughout “open standards” in ICT industries (Russell, 2014) in order to favor a competitive mobile web paradigm. Does the Living Standard means a loss in the authority of standardization of the W3C? Does the big players of the digital economy have agreed in kidnapping standardization processes towards their interests? Commodification of everyday data? Commodification of everyday living? Prosumers and Digital Business Models as the main forces of web standardization? We have to rethink Web standards in order to prevent inequalities in the digital sphere and to foster a much more inclusive digital data economy.

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Conclusions

Dr. Rául Tabarés raul.tabares@tecnalia.com

@faraondemetal https://es.linkedin.com/in/rtabares

www.tecnalia.com

Thanks a lot and keep in touch!!!