It's always fascinating to read up about the history of languages. Another fascinating story is about how Javascript came into existence - it's a video by Douglas Crockford.
http://video.yahoo.com/watch/111593/1710507
A while back I spent some time following some of the W3 lists relating to web fonts. It amazed me just how open the process is .. any interested party can offer a view and attempt to influence the process.
To me, someone new to the process, it seemed that this arrangement was very democratic - and I was surprised that there weren't more people involved in the discussion, when so many millions of developers are set to be affected by the decisions that are made.
I was also left wondering if I'd have as much optimism and enthusiasm if I tried to become involved in traditional government politics ...
Reading this, it occurs to me that designers probably had little to no input into the creation of HTML and CSS. In other words, everyone struggles with this format today because the creators didn't pay attention to a group of users that would turn out to be very large. I guess hindsight is 20/20.
There are many drivers towards HTML5/CSS3, but at least one of them is meeting the needs of designers, so obviously this is in the process of being corrected. Like most people, I've been pretty anti-IE, but someone pointed out to me that HTML5 actually standardizes a lot of features that Microsoft implemented years ago - shadows, gradients, glows, embeddable fonts, opacity, etc. Vector graphics? Microsoft: VML in IE5, 1999. Mozilla: SVG in Firefox 1.5, 2005.
Maybe if open source and standards-based browser developers had taken the lead in supporting designers' needs, they could have overtaken IE years ago.
> HTML5 actually standardizes a lot of features that Microsoft implemented years ago - shadows, gradients, glows, embeddable fonts, opacity, etc
Embeddable fonts are CSS, which is orhogonal to HTML5. Shadows and gradients are in <canvas> 2D context, but the well-known ones are also CSS properties, not HTML5.
SVG is based on VML. Microsoft proposed it to W3C (http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-VML), and W3C developed it further until it became SVG.
Microsoft's shadows, gradients and opactiy were based on DirectX filters with own horrible syntax, that didn't even tokenize according to CSS syntax. It couldn't be accepted in original form. Current syntax has been mostly invented by Apple (but gradients have been deemed too ugly as well, and spec went with Mozilla's syntax).
> SVG is based on VML. Microsoft proposed it to W3C (http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-VML), and W3C developed it further until it became SVG.
Not exactly.
When Adobe and Netscape submitted PGML[1] for standardisation, Macromedia and Microsoft responded by submitting VML[2]. SVG was born as a synthesis of both, but the dominance of IE (which supported VML instead of SVG) and Flash (thanks to being bundled with Windows) meant that there were no decent authoring tools or meaningful browser support for SVG. Far from being a serious contribution to open standards, VML was a counter-offensive in the Browser Wars.
I'm not saying they did a good job, implementation wise. But isn't it a shame that I have to thank Microsoft for helping out designers instead of the browser standards people?
Well CSS was invented by "browser standards people" to make design easier and more powerful. (Blame browser bugs and incompatibilities for making them more difficult than necessary to use.)
Microsofts inventions (Ajax, drag-drop, contentEditable) were more targeted towards application development than design.
Maybe you're misunderstanding - many of the new CSS3 properties that make life easier for designers implement features that IE has had since IE6 and even earlier. Standards-compliant browser developers are only catching up now.
Alternately, if Microsoft had consulted with designers and users, and been less hostile to the concept of standards those features would actually have been used. At the time, however, they were in full strangulation mode and things like directly porting truly horrid Windows APIs (all DirectX features, drag and drop, rich text editing, etc.) was considered a feature because it made it much harder for anyone else to implement those for a competing browser or platform.
The Web basically lost a decade thanks to browser vendors, particularly Microsoft, trying lock-in games. The OSS browsers are the only thing which saved it since none of the old corporate players valued quality or performance as much as market-share (and, consequently, OS licenses or advertising).
> Reading this, it occurs to me that designers probably had little to no input into the creation of HTML and CSS.
You're right, and I think this makes sense given the history that Mark recounts. Originally, HTML was a format for marking up documents. I imagine there weren't many designers interested in improving a document markup language.
Only in the last ten years, with HTML becoming a common way to build business websites and then full applications, has the widespread involvement of designers in building web pages become commonplace. When HTML and CSS were formulated in the 1990s, there weren't any "web designers" to speak of.
