Questions and Answers derived from an interview with Shane McCarron of The Open Group on CNET radio, 7^th October 1998

Introduction The Web Standards Project and The Open Group have announced a collaborative effort to ensure support for Standards on the World Wide Web and the development of test suite. This will help developers by avoiding the need for them to write one kind of web page for one browser and then go do another version of it for another browser. They should be able to rely on every browser working the same way so they don’t have to detect and respond to the needs of a particular browser on the client site. Currently we have a huge mess, and a lot of overhead for sophisticated web publishers.

Question 1         What is the nature of Open Group Announcement?

Answer        The Open Group endorses the goals of the Web Standards Project which has 4,800 members. These goals involve the identification of key internet standards and ensuring that those standards are supported by the browser manufacturers, the client manufacturers and ultimately by the content providers, like CNet.

Question 2      We in CNET have been working on Java scripts and found the need to modify the code to make it work in both Navigator and Internet Explorer. Is it possible to say that one or other of the browsers is the one that is not adhering to the standards? In the process are you not pointing the finger?

Answer        The Open Group does not point fingers! The Open Group’s job is to identify the key standards and provide testing technology to help the implementers of those standards to ensure that they are conforming.

Question 3         The Open Group will not be in a position to point fingers although I expect other people will?

Answer        Exactly right! The key problem through lack of conformance is that it s impossible to develop interesting and intricate portable web content today. CNet provides an example. When it develops "portable content" it is really developing adaptive content. You are adapting to the different requirements of each browser, which are each broken in some way. This is not really acceptable to content providers. It means that the solutions are sub-optimal and the costs of supporting multiple browsers are unbelievably high. The Web Standards Project shows that the problems that content providers have to work around are costing them an extra 25% in development time and money.

Question 4      Anyone who’s worked in a web development environment that cares about having fully transportable content and a sophisticated one does, knows that it’s not just more work. This type of work is some of the most "scratch your head" type of work to make it work on two browsers.

Answer            Well and you’re only talking about two - there are hundreds of browsers out there.

Question 5        What’s the way that groups like Open Standards groups or the W3C can really put some muscle behind and help solve the problem? Many would say since the Net has become so commercialised these groups are toothless compared to these enormous money machines like Netscape and Microsoft who have a lot of will of their own

Answer         Commercial organizations are allowed to have free will, it’s fundamental to our democracy and way of living. You have to temper that free will with market reality. If the Open Group were a small group of people sitting around a room we wouldn’t get anywhere but The Open Group has over 200 member organizations that represent some of largest procurers of systems and software in the world. If our members are mandating conformance to certain standards then implementers are going to sit up and listen.

Even implementers like Microsoft and Netscape listen to their customers. Our members also include the major vendors like IBM, Sun, Hewlett Packard, and the largest client providers in the world. These organizations have a vested interest in satisfying the needs of their customers and they’re going to make sure that the software they provide on their platforms meets the customer needs.

Question 6         Are you going to handle the Internet streaming issue between Real and Microsoft? They are fighting over who takes precedence over media types. Are you sticking with Internet languages like HTML?

Answer             The Open Group will ultimately address things like what streaming media types need to be supported on Clients. It may be that more than one needs to be supported but we need the content providers to decide.

We want to initiate a dialogue with the major content providers and determine their real requirements. We can work on these requirements in terms of codified standards, see if new standards are needed, and develop tests that evaluate conformance to those standards and ultimately implementations that adhere to those standards. So we want to be an application developer driven process. We should ask content providers such as CNet, what they need supported so that you can satisfy the needs of their customer base.

Question 7         Do things like XML and SMILE, and the increasing complexity of the languages used to create the content, make the job of achieving conformity very difficult? In XML, as in the name, it’s extensible - it can be customised in so many ways. Is it too much to hope that the net can really be as seamless and transportable as it could have been last year lets say, but in this quest for richness aren’t we getting into such a complicated arena that we have to live with some degree of breakage?

XML is extensible, but it does not mean you have to extend it. XML is a way to describe grammars that will make it easier for people to develop browsers that work right. A well-defined Document Type Definition (DTD) will help. The HTML Next Generation Working Group within the W3C is working very hard to define an HTML DTD that runs in XML so all we’re doing there is expressing HTML within an XML context.

We fully expect content providers like CNet to rely upon XML or HTML going forward. You have to worry about existing platforms for a long time. If you went and talked to the developers they will probably tell you that they’re still seeing a lot of Netscape 2 clients in the market. Let’s not forget the 1.3 million users of America On-line.

Question 8        What about Web TV?

Answer Web TV or the set top boxes that Cable and Wireless are deploying in England right now are examples of approaches being adopted around the world. A lot of the browsers employed are HTML based and HTML is the way we are going to be for a long time.