Jon On Tech

Through this open world I’m about to ramble,
Through ice and snows, sleet and rain,
I’m about to ride that mornin’ railroad,
P’raps I’ll die on that train.
- MAN OF CONSTANT SORROW

During the panel discussion at the recent British Computer Society Open Source event, there was discussion (and confusion) about Open Source versus Open Standards. I was asked “So, can you give us some examples of Open Standards”. I rattled off a few, but I thought I’d add a few more here. There is a lot more to be said on the topic, but a good place to start is to list the standards that I think are important.

If I get the time, I plan to turn this into a nice diagram that is much more easily digestible. If there are important standards that I’ve forgotten about that anyone interested in web sites should know about, please let me know in the comments. I’d avoided worrying about file formats (e.g. PNG, MPEG, PDF). And REST isn’t a standard – it is an architectural style that was developed in parallel with the HTTP/1.1 protocol. I’m sure there are many many important ones I’ve left out though.

This is a long and boring post with a record-breaking number of acronyms. So maybe you should stop reading now.

The Internet Plumbing

These standards are the plumbing of the Internet. Like the sewers under a big city, they are impossible to change and will be there forever. They’re infrastructure. Some people are saying Twitter has already become infrastructure, but I’m not convinced about that yet. These standards are split into layers – the link layer is about physical connection to a network and include standards such as Ethernet. The Internet layer routes packets of information across one or more network using the Internet protocol (IP). The Transport Layer is responsible for the reliable delivery of messages, and uses standards such as TCP or UDP. Finally, the Application Layer provides higher level application specific protocols such as DNS, HTTP (and WebDAV) for web servers, FTP, SMTP for mail servers, NTP for time servers, LDAP for user directories and so on. But I’m not here to talk about any of these. I want to talk about the standards that sit on top of these, specifically for web pages.

Making Web Pages

First 10 Years of the W3C - Click for large version

Let’s start with the standards we know and love that make up web pages. Of course we have HTML 4, XHTML and the eagerly awaited HTML 5. We make our HTML pretty using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and we interact with the page using the Document Object Model (DOM), which has a large number of associated standards. Note AJAX is not a standard, despite what you might hear. The XMLHttpRequest DOM API (which can be used to implement AJAX) is currently a last call working draft and may be a W3C standard soon. Another client side standard, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) never really took off and probably never will.

So we have standards to make interactive web pages that may or may not be semantically rich. But the world would be a better place if these pages can be accessed by as many people as possible. So we have accessibility standards as part of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). These include Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) for your web page and the imminent Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA).

Excellent! Our HTML is neat, we’ve styled it, and all humans can interact with it. But what about the machines? They don’t understand our badly structured markup. If we want machines to be able to understand the content, we need to engage with the semantic web standards and Resource Description Framework (RDF). The UK public sector is keen on HTML+RDFa although this is not a W3C standard yet. You can query your RDF data set using SPARQL and define your ontology (formal representation of concepts and relations between them) using the Web Ontology Language (OWL, not WOL). While we’re at it, a related and very succesful standard which touches my world is the Dublin Core Metadata Standard, which is an ISO standard. I like this good introduction to Semantic Web standards if you want to read more.

The Biggest Standard of the Naughties

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a hugely successful standard. If you judge the success of a standard by its adoption (which I do), it was the Hit of the Decade. XML Schema (XSD) has replaced the ill-thought-out DTD standard for defining XML structures. Other child standards include the node selection language XPath and query language XQuery. XSL Transformations (XSLT) is my favourite templating language. XML Inclusions (XInclude) joins XML documents together. They’ve also given us XForms to collect data – sadly it hasn’t taken off as I’d have liked.

Also XML related, the Web Services Standards have given us a wonderful way to make remote services play together. The Holy Trinity behind Web Services are SOAP (previously Simple Object Access Protocol) to define the message formats, Web Services Description Language (WSDL) to give service descriptions and Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) to find the services. UDDI is actually an OASIS specification, not W3C, but it fits better here.

OASIS standards

OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), in their own words, “drives the development, convergence and adoption of open standards for the global information society”. The OASIS standards that touch my world include, in no particular order: