Web Standards in FLOSS Development
(was: Open Source and Web
Standards)
fOSSa,
Grenoble, 8 November 2010
Abstract
Open source plays a key role in the development of standards for the web.
With open source, new technologies, or extensions to existing technologies, may
be experimented and demonstrated during the early stages of standard
development. This provides feedback to standard bodies during the design phase,
making stadards more robust. This also makes sure that implementations are
available as soon as the standard is finished, thus facilitating early adoption
of new standards. We analyze in this talk the benefits that open source brings
to open standards, based on the experience gained with the Amaya project that
is hosted jointly by W3C and INRIA.
Overview
Open Source and Web Standards
- Web standards
- What FOSS and web standards have in common
- How web standards benefit from FOSS
- An example: the Amaya web editor
- Demos
Web Standards -- Examples
Examples of web standards:
- HTML, SVG, MathML, CSS, HTTP, URIs, DOM
Web standards define different things:
- Document languages and formats: HTML, SVG, MathML -- CSS
- Network protocols: HTTP
- Addressing schemes: URIs
- APIs: DOM
Not all formats used on the web are web standards:
Web Standards -- Features
A web standard is a technical specification that
- contributes to interoperability on the web,
- is available to anyone for free,
- is developed through an open process,
- is not encumbered by patents,
- integrates into other web standards (web platform),
- is extensible to cope with the evolutions of the web.
Commonalities
FOSS and web standards have much in common:
- Open development
- Involvement of a community
- Patent free
- Reusability, extensibility
Web Standards and Implementation
Web standards require running code
- Experiment -- standard development
- Demonstrate -- feedback from community
- Popularize -- deployment of standards
FOSS plays a key role in these development phases of web standards
- Famous examples: Apache server, Firefox browser
Role of FOSS in Web Standards
Specific features of FOSS are important to web standards:
- Early releases of implementations bring early feedback on standards
- Open code eases early implementation of standards
-- especially for extentions to existing standards (HTML, CSS)
- Free software stimulates early adoption
- Popuarity of FOSS tools contributes strongly to adoption
An Example: Amaya
A web editor developed jointly by W3C and INRIA with the community
- Editing web pages online
- Integrated editing and browsing features
- Strict conformance to standards
- A structured approach to HTML and other document formats
- WYSIWYG style of interface
- Compound documents: text, tables, forms, graphics, mathematical
notations, links
Support for a number of web standards: HTML, URIs, HTTP, CSS, SVG, MathML,
XLink, RDF, RDFa
Structure Editing
A single editing environment
- The internal data structure is a tree (XML structure)
- The structure is edited through is graphical representations
- A single structure for text, graphics, mathematics, etc.
Demo
Editing Style
Style (in CSS) defines the graphical aspect of the document structure
- Style is edited in the same environment
- Style may be specified at different levels (style sheets)
- Debugging style sheets may be complex
Demo
Editing Links
Links are first class citizens on the web
- Editing URIs is error-prone
- Editing documents could break links
- Links are not restricted to text
- Specific tools are necessary to edit links
Demo
Early experiments
This editing environment was (is) used for a number of experiments
- Editing web pages online -- one-click publication
- Editing links, XLink
- Early CSS implementation
- XML syntax, XHTML
Early experiments (cont'd)
- Compound documents, XML namespaces
- Structured graphics (SVG), Text / Graphics integration
- Text / Mathematics / Graphics integration (MathML)
- Document Object Model (DOM)
- RDFa -- RDF annotations in HTML pages
Concluding Remarks
- The initial web was based on FOSS (CERN httpd)
- Very popular web tools are FOSS
- FOSS plays a key role on the developement of Web standards
- The web would not exist without FOSS
