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:

We grew up together
From the cradle to the grave
We died and were reborn
And then mysteriously saved.
- OH, SISTER

I gotta admit, this one took me by surprise. Open Text has just announced that they are aquiring Vignette. There were the usual rumours in the air, but I don’t think many people took it seriously. I know I didn’t. First RedDot. Then Vizible. Now this. Anyone remember Gauss and Obtree? I’ve been using Vignette since 1999 and have become very fond of it. Maybe this is the Stockholm Syndrome, but anyway.

I’m not going to write much now – I need time to digest things – but there is a lot to think about here. But off the top of my confused head:

• The Vignette name will probably vanish in the same way that the RedDot name recently did. How about “More Open Text Web Solutions”? That’s catchy. The end of an era, as I blogged about here.
• I suspect that Vignette Content Management is going to be around for a while. A lot of customers have been through a lot of effort recently to get onto the latest versions. I can’t see Open Text messing with that baby. So it looks like three Open Text CMS choices for a while – the original, the ex-RedDot and the ex-VCM.
• Vignette have a Collaboration product, and have recently announced their new Vignette Community Services. OpenText have a large Collaboration and Community Management component. Something is going to happen here.
• I think the Portal will stay as it is. Open Text currently have the Open Text Portal Integration Kit. Expect to see this become tightly ingrated with VAP via the JSR-168 portlets. Hopefully it will replace Dynamic Portal in the longer term. Open Text don’t have their own portal.
• The needs to be some Records Management consolidation I would think. No point have both Open Text Records Management and Vignette Records Manager is there? I’m guessing one of these will become dominant, and customers will be (slowly) migrated. This will take many years, though.
• Maybe there will be a similar product collision in the Imaging/Workflow/Capture area, and the Business Process Management areas. I don’t know much about this stuff, so ain’t going to guess anything.
• Open Text have a more more mature DAM offering in Artesia. I wonder if the much heralded, newly launched Vignette Rich Media is going to have a long and healthy life. Maybe some of the fancy front end technology will get used (Vizible is more fancy). I suspect the Vignette’s DAM days are numbered.

I really really hope that this is going to be a good thing for Vignette. Maybe it is exactly what they needed. But, on the other hand, maybe it isn’t. In my experience, these things are never that smooth for the company that gets absorbed. I do worry about the existing Vignette employees. These kinds of deals are never without pain, and I hope that the people that have been sweating blood for VIGN aren’t badly affected. I also worry about the existing Vignette customers – I see roadmap changes on the horizon. I’m sure the customer-centric analysts will have a lot to say here.

And finally, I wonder how much fun Tony Byrne is going to have drawing the 2010 Content Technology Vendor Map. The number of big stations is getting smaller every day.

Can’t talk any more now. Got a call with a Vignette OpenText client.

[UPDATE: It seems not everyone was as surprised as me! Laurence "@piewords" Hart gazed into his Crystal Ball and called it in January. And the Big Men On Content picked it up last August. Matt Asay even had the numbers right back then. They've got their ears to the ground.]

Mr. Frog went a-hoppin’ up over the brook, Uh-huh,
Mr. Frog went a-hoppin’ up over the brook, Uh-huh,
Mr. Frog went a-hoppin’ up over the brook.
A lily-white duck come and swallowed him up, Uh-huh.
- FROGGIE WENT A COURTIN’

Had a look at the People’s United Bank site that has just been launched and recently tweeted. Firstly, well done to everyone involved for getting it live. Always nice to see a new big CMS driven site. It looks good too – nice and clean. Hats off to the designers.

But I do have to ask my friends at Vignette – was it really necessary to use your portal products (Vignette Application Portal and Dynamic Portal Module) for this? I have only looked at the site for 15 minutes, so have probably missed something huge. But I’m going to assume I haven’t and soldier on.

I realise it is a bank, so there are probably a lot more Portal suitable features behind the different logins. But all of those seem to go off-site away from the Portal implementation at the moment. It’s often the other way round. The post-login functionality is driven by a portal, not the pre-login informational/marketing section. The site seems to be primarily static content. Maybe the content differs depending on your ZIP code – not easy to tell.

Portals are meant to aggregate applications, not provide a set of off-site links to them. The login goes to a server running ASP.NET. The career application is an offsite IFRAME. The branch finder goes to MapQuest. The search goes to Mondo with a secure/unsecure warning. Even the search results are displayed on Mondo, but maybe this is for the term highlighting.

I’ve noticed on the Vignette site that the Portal product is now classified under Intranet , not under Web Content Management. That’s a step in the right direction. It can make a mighty fine Intranet. But it still seems to get recommended as the delivery mechanism for every site you launch.

Maybe there are no downsides to using the Portal for this site. But if it is so easy to fix the friendly URLs , the validating markup, and the TABLE based layouts , I’m looking forward to seeing them in the next release of this site. Google really digs that stuff, and banks really dig organic traffic. At the very least, please put the <link> to vgn-ext-templating.css somewhere after the opening<html> tag.

The implementation was probably a fair bit of effort too, I’m guessing. Did you choose an external spider for the site search because it felt right, or because it is actually quite difficult to implement an internal search on a Portal? Any issues with sessions and bookmarking? Do the editorial team need to use both the VCM and VAP to create new pages, or do they have a nice, single tool that they use to create pages and content? And it is all easy and cheap to maintain?

I guess someone might have played the “we’re not using the Portal functionality for Phase 1, but we need a future-proof platform to carry us forward” card. Or did someone say synergies a lot? Oh for a penny for every non-implemented planned Phase 2 feature I’ve seen. We all love agile development these days; whatever happened to agile product choices? If the post-login part of this site is live on VAP in the next 12 months, however, I’ll eat my hat, apologise, and buy everyone lots and lots of beer.

I really like the VCM. And I really like VAP. But this site isn’t a Portal. Dear Vignette, please don’t make us use VAP for everything. You do have other delivery mechanisms. Dear other major vendors, stop smirking. Many of you do the same.

Not every site is a Portal. Sometimes a Portal is really a Gate To Hell. Here there be Demons.