Recently in Standards Category

Today, the Ecma International Technical Committee 39 (TC39) announced it will focus work on the next ECMAScript standard, which will be known as “Harmony” and on ES3.1 (ECMA-262 Edition 3.1), with full collaboration of all parties involved in the subgroups of the TC39 (ECMAScript) committee. Work on ES3.1 will unite the committee in its work to create the next Ecma JavaScript standard, targeting two interoperable implementations by early 2009.

Adobe thinks this harmonization effort is a good thing. However, some blogs and comments have come out with the perspective that Adobe has “lost” the standards battle on ActionScript as a standard.

So let’s try to set the story a bit straighter.

Adobe (and Macromedia before) has been part of the revitalized ECMAScript efforts for a long time. The evolution of ECMAScript after the publication of the now current ECMA-262 in December 1999 [http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-262.htm] had stalled and as the web evolved, it was clear that the standard needed to be re-examined. Macromedia was a key part of that restart.

Standards (as I’ve mentioned before) do not drive innovation; rather they are desirable for setting a baseline of commonality. Since ActionScript is based on ECMA-262, it made sense for Adobe to offer it as a point for consideration as a basis for starting discussion on the next ECMAScript.

Unfortunately, as is the case with many standards, the situation became a tug of war. Standards aren’t just about the good of the community; they are also now recognized as competitive advantages. A new standard for ECMAScript thus became mired in a morass of bickering, infighting, and sometimes, out and out name calling; the politics of competition. It became clear that members could not arrive at the consensus needed to allow a decade of advancements to be incorporated into the next generation of ECMAScript.

Adobe is for standards. Standards make it possible to interoperate, intercommunicate and build rich experiences. I’ve stated that openness is like a conversation, in that we need a standard basis for understanding. We’re aligned with the needs of the web in stabilizing ECMAScript. This harmony will allow at least some improvements, updating of the existing standard, and for us to all be able to “talk” on the web with every one.

However, the web has evolved, and innovation is needed to continue to deliver rich applications and access to information. Adobe will continue to provide innovative technology through continuing to advance ActionScript (which, as mentioned, itself is based on ECMAScript).

We’ve already taken the steps to make sure that this innovative technology is available to everyone through release to open source of the Flex SDK, BlazeDS and the Tamarin VM (the virtual machine for ActionScript ). Open source is yet another aspect of being open. Open source powers innovation, just as standards tend to stabilize commonality. Using the conversation metaphor, open source allows us to talk in ways we might not have had in the past, whether it is in new words or new jargon. We’ll continue to work with all the groups, such as Open Ajax Alliance, Eclipse, Linux Foundation, as well as the standards groups defining the web.

In short, we agree with the necessity of the Ecma TC39 ES harmony effort. We’ll continue to be involved, in both ES Harmony and in future generations of ECMAScript. We will track Ecma efforts within ActionScript but won’t stop innovating ActionScript, which millions of developers rely on and is key to so many incredible web experiences today. It’s in our charter to make it possible to push the limits of what can be done on the web. We’ll continue to work with and for the community of folks who want to build the best the web can offer.

I invite you to join Adobe and myself in a conversation about where the web is going to evolve, built on a stable, mainstream base of standards.

Well, while it's not "done" done., the ballot on PDF for Draft International Standard (DIS) is in.  The ballot closed 2-Dec-2007, and the results are overwhelmingly in favor of approval for ISO 32000 PDF.  93% said yes, which is a clear indication of the importance of PDF throughout the world, and to the solid nature of the underlying PDF specification.

Now this was a lot of effort to pull together. We did follow a "lobby-free" policy with this effort.  We did answer concerns when we were asked to clarify.  We did log a few air miles when invited to discuss this in public forums. And we also took the PDF specification 1.7, removed any product dependencies, and created a world class draft standard. There was involvement in many groups within Adobe, engineering, products, marketing, legal, and the commitment from everyone to make this happen. And maybe a few of us lost some sleep over the last few days waiting for the result .

The next phase of standards is more difficult. Creating a formal standard from a good de facto standard used by thousands of independent products is, well, not easy, but straightforward. Creating a new standard, or moving a standard requires dedicated, knowledgeable people who can spend the time and energy to create a specification that enables movement  from the old and still keeps pace with use and technology. Finding those people is hard, getting their time is harder.

Adobe will work with ISO as it enters into the next phases of this standards process, and the company looks forward to collaborating with a global team that will continue to improve future ISO PDF standards. But Adobe is now just part of that global team.

So watch this space for updates... and I'm going to go catch a nap.

Again, Jay of The Mows has succinctly expressed an issue in the open world of source and standards.

And there are some real issues here.

I was reading Consortiuminfo.org (as I always do when it updates). Andy Updegrove, who kept many of us informed on the machinations with OOXML, posted "Words, Standards and Torture: What's in a Name", which I highly recommend you read.  No, it's not about how standards meetings are torture, but it is about how words are the tools we use to define standards.  And sometimes those words mean different things to us all. Or get redefined. Or as best put by Indigo Montoya in "The Princess Bride"; " "You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means." Too often we honestly or deliberately choose to redefine meanings of words, like open or free.

Now, I have my opinions, and so do thousands (millions?) of others. We hear high visibility types like Richard Stallman talk about open versus free. We hear Jim Zemlin discuss the multidimensional intertwinings of open and free. And you know what? It only means what you think it means.

Words do have power.  They have the power you give them (or society gives them, in the form of laws or cultural pressures). I favor open source, and it should be my freedom to choose such. Yes, open source doesn't mean necessarily free (as in beer) nor necessarily free (as in speech), but I do expect to be free to make up my own mind.

To me, free is the ability to implement what I want when I want. (and yes, anarchy is the only form of government that works the way it was designed... extra credit to the first person identifying the source of that paraphrase). To me, my freedom should not impinge on yours, but yours shouldn't impinge on mine.  I don't like people saying " Ooo, your's is cool, give it to me". I do like saying "Here, try this".

Open standards should be about the freedom to implement. It shouldn't be about me giving you my implementation for free. While that can lead us into the messy area of patents, copyrights, the new "hate phrase" of intellectual property, I should be able to build to a truly open standard without impact.

There should be no winners or losers in the openness game. Not knowing the meaning isn't a path to winning.

Asking questions until we reach a mutual, freely derived agreement is winning for both sides.

Ajax,Flex,Video,standards

Hopefully by now you know about Adobe and the open sourcing of Flex.

But do you know about Adobe and Ajax in both open source and in standards?

So, let me tell you.

First Adobe is a member of the Open Ajax Alliance, an an organization of leading vendors, open source projects, and companies using Ajax that are dedicated to the successful adoption of open and interoperable Ajax-based Web technologies.This is a very active, very committed and very, very open organization. Adobe is proud to be a member, and we take part in a number of different working groups and task forces.

In fact, we recently proposed a new task force, on searchability. Yeah, I know, you know how to search Ajax... right? Well, from the Task Force proposal:

While the impact of AJAX has been substantially expanded, the impact of the overall search ability of web sites may be adversely affected by the use of AJAX. Complex web sites built with content from an XML source are often essentially invisible to search engines. While suggestions for workarounds exist, no clear or sufficient methods exist within practices today.

We believe this is a significant lack within AJAX and would offer that OpenAjax is the appropriate venue to resolve this lack.

To accomplish this, we would propose the start of a task force to bring together the framework developers and the search engine companies to help identify which hooks are necessary and possible.  

The desired end goal would be that even in complex web sites which are built entirely using an AJAX framework with all of the data presented via asynchronous XML, there is still sufficient metadata/context available to search engines such that they can understand the content of the application AND provide deep linking into those applications.   The idea is to extend the AJAX frameworks so that they include the metadata necessary for search engines to understand the data that is flowing through an Ajax application as well as the context/state within an application that is associated with that data.

 The end product would be a set of best practice recommendation for frameworks that would be compatible with the major search engines or a set of recommendations to other working groups or task forces.

Now, as a standards wonk (and a cat), I'm not actually capable of groking this. But it seems that creating a dynamic web site based on my request (for catnip brownie recipes) might not be searchable, thus considering googling, it doesn't exist. I'm sure you have workarounds, but a standard way of making this searchable has to be good for the adoption of Ajax.

Continuing on the Ajax theme for a minute, are you aware that Adobe has things that can help you bridge technologies like Flash and Ajax? It's called the Flash-Ajax Video Component and is open source code.  Yep, open source. Free as in BSD license. FAVideo is a small, open source Flash component that you can use to provide video playback within an Ajax application. It exposes all of the formatting and video playback controls necessary to build a video player customized entirely using HTML and Javascript.

How about the Flex Ajax Bridge, part of the Flex SDK we open sourced under MPL? FABridge ) is a small, unobtrusive code library that you can insert into an Adobe® Flex™ application, a Flex component, or even an empty SWF file to expose it to scripting in the browser."

"To humbly borrow a page from the Ruby on Rails community, FABridge " is built with the “don’t repeat yourself” principle in mind. Rather than having to define new, simplified APIs to expose a graph of ActionScript objects to JavaScript, with FABridge you can make your ActionScript classes available to JavaScript without any additional coding. After you insert the library, essentially anything you can do with ActionScript, you can do with JavaScript."

Or Spry, a framework for Ajax. "The Spry framework for AJAX is a JavaScript library for web designers that provides functionality that allows designers to build pages that provide a richer experience for their users. It is designed to bring AJAX to the web design community who can benefit from AJAX, but are not well served other frameworks." It's also under the BSD license.

Anyway, I thought you'd like an insight into what Adobe is doing in openness around Ajax.

As always, comments (and cat treats) welcome.

I'm quite sure Jay didn't realize he was drawing a political cartoon with The Mows but it's either that, or my mind is slightly skewed into reading between the lines. However, Jay again has managed to capture a unique view (yes, pun intended) on my worlds of open source and standards.

You often hear the phrase "Perception is Reality" used in marketing. A well-turned phrase, it indicates that what someone perceives about your product or service is (their) reality. And often, that reality is contagious, spreading rapidly to make others perceive a similar reality.

Companies often use this concept to distort reality, adding to their own ego-dollar (and real dollar) pile. You know, the ones that say "My car makes you more virile", My clothes make you look thinner", "My products make you better". We hear see and probably even taste this every day.

In open source implementation, self-delusion is not a good idea. Perception is perception and reality is reality. Yet time and again, we see a similar play in marketing of open source.  I always like the one: "Microsoft is a bad company, so buy me instead". (Not to say Microsoft isn't a bad company. .., but, just sayin').

Too often open source inside of large companies is "Perception is delusion".  I'm seen (and worked for) companies that see themselves as good citizens, while chaos reigns around them. A product is not good just because it's open source; a product is equally not bad just because it isn't open source. Experience the reality, if the product solves your problem, then it is good. And you should be  the ultimate arbiter of what solves your problem.

A few companies back, it was decreed that the company would use Exchange and Outlook, because it was the "only calendar system that works". Note the "Perception" here.  That perception was created by a failed attempt at other calendaring systems in 1997... yes, 10 years ago. Anybody got a different view? (I certainly do.)

A recent consultation started with the concept that "opening our product would reduce costs". Wrong again.  Open sourcing a closed product will always increase costs, in spite of the potential improved QA.

I do admit, when I first saw this comic (and yeah, I visit every day, it's my perceptional delusion), I immediately thought of the recent spin on OOXML and the failed ISO ballot. I leave it to the observer to do the logical proof, but let me point out that a press release is not (or should not be) a reality distortion generator, despite the existence proof of Steve Jobs at Apple. As for the press release, do the math.

While here at Adobe, we have delivered the PDF specification to ISO for standardization, we being very careful to avoid self deception. Note that we haven't managed to buy countries, stack ballots, or anything like that.  We are offering to have a conversation (remember that thing about openness, it's a conversation), check out the Inside PDF blog to find out more.

Perception is perception, reality is reality. In open source or open standards, the reality matters. Be it in Posh and Beckham (as Matt Asay points out) or in "The Mows", be sure you are not the one dis-floor-einted

comments welcome