

Picture by Stevendepolo at Flickr. CC-BY licenced.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn't have an easy manner in the flesh; there isn't the relaxed manner of a politician, whose careers depends on putting people at their ease. Instead, Berners-Lee has a darting, urgent manner. And his career has turned out to be one which ends up putting people at their unease: look around at what the web has done to the world, and the huge upheaval it's caused, and that's Berners-Lee, magnified.

Now he's turned his gaze to the Gordian Knot that is the HTML5 specification.

For this we need to backtrack a bit, and see where things have gotten to since the last time I wrote about Apple/Flash/HTML5 at the start of February.

The question then was, if Apple is not going to have Flash on the iPad or iPhone/iPod Touch – because it implements HTML5's handling of video, via H.264, embedded directly in web pages via the Canvas API – is Adobe's technology going to find a home in HTML5?

Since then sooo much has happened. Let's unload some links:

The Flashmobileblog looks at battery performance of Flash Player on Google's (sorta flashy) Nexus One:

"Bloggers from Daring Fireball and Macgasm have spent a little more time than expected studying the battery indicators, as opposed to the incredible advancements in web browsing for mobile phones, netbooks and tablets. "

Umm, perhaps: it depends on whether you think battery life is more important than being able to see that awesome Flash opening page for that restaurant.

An Adobe engineer said that the next version Flash will be so much better on Mac OSX, honest.

Simon St Laurent wrote, over at O'Reilly, about "the widening HTML5 chasm". (He's a former worker on the World Wide Web Consortium (aka W3C), where Berners-Lee has of course toiled for longer than one would have thought humanly possible.) He reckoned that discordant interests would leave HTML5 damaged and its credibility weakened.

And then the Free Software Foundation urged Google to kill Flash by open-sourcing its video codecs and pushing them out to YouTube users - meaning "The world would have a new free format unencumbered by software patents."

No response from Google – which announced that it's dropping Gears support, so it can concentrate on HTML5 support in the Chrome browser.

Jason Garrett-Glaser, the primary x264 developer and an ffmpeg developer, noted (in a long post about Flash, Adobe, and performance) that Adobe has made two critical mistakes: first, assuming Linux and Apple's OSX didn't matter (turned out lots of important developers are there) and secondly, attacking free software:

"Practically all the websites on the internet use free software solutions on their servers — not merely limited to LAMP-like stacks. Youtube, Facebook, Hulu, and Vimeo all use ffmpeg and x264. Adobe's H.264 encoder in Flash Media Encoder is so utterly awful that it is far worse than ffmpeg's H.263 or Theora; they're practically assuming users will go use x264 instead. For actual server software, the free software Red5 is extraordinarily popular for RTMP-based systems. And yet, despite all this, Adobe served a Cease&Desist order to servers hosting RTMPdump, claiming (absurdly) that it violated the DMCA due to allowing users to save video streams to their hard disk. RTMPdump didn't die, of course, and it was just one program, but this attack lingered in the minds of developers worldwide. It made clear to them that Adobe was no friend of free software."

There's plenty more in the post – it's basically your essential backgrounder on the technical and financial obstacles to HTML5 video.

The key question is: who's going to get their way with HTML5? The companies who want to keep the kitchen sink in? Or those which want it to be a more flexible format which might also be able to displace some rather comfortable organisations that are doing fine with things as they are? Adobe, it turned out, seemed to be trying to slow things down a little. It was accused of trying to put HTML5 "on hold". It strongly denied it. Others said it was using "procedural bullshit".

Then Berners-Lee weighed in with a post on the W3 mailing list. First he noted the history:

"Some in the community have raised questions recently about whether some work products of the HTML Working Group are within the scope of the Group's charter. Specifically in question were the HTML Canvas 2D API, and the HTML Microdata and HTML+RDFa Working Drafts."

(Translation: Adobe seems to have been trying to slow things down on at least one of these points.)

And then he pushes:

"I agree with the WG [working group] chairs that these items -- data and canvas – are reasonable areas of work for the group. It is appropriate for the group to publish documents in this area."

Chop! And that's it. There goes the Gordian Knot. With that simple message, Berners-Lee has probably created a fresh set of headaches for Adobe - but it means that we can also look forward to a web with open standards, rather than proprietary ones, and where commercial interests don't get to push it around.

The upshot: HTML5, as a standard, may still be some years off. But the fact that there's so much interest in it, and that browsers – Apple's Safari, Mozilla's Firefox, Google's Chrome – are already starting to incorporate parts of its specification now means that in some parts of the web, the latest sites will work really well. The advantage there goes both to the sites and to the users of those browsers. (Remember too that Firefox is the most widely-chosen browser in the world.)

So Adobe really does have a problem now. It will be very interesting to see how it reacts, and how it keeps Flash moving forward over the next ten years. At the very least, it might want to take some advice from x.264's Garrett-Glaser: be open, don't ignore platforms, work on performance.

And where will Berners-Lee pop up next? Ah – following his success in getting data.gov.uk to happen, he's now focussing on UK local authorities. If you work in one, you have been warned …