What Does Openness Mean To Your Community?

Myself, Mike Ellis (Eduserv) and Ross Gardler (JISC OSS Watch) are the co-authors of a paper on “What Does Openness Mean To The Museum Community?” which has been accepted for the Museums and the Web 2008 conference. And I’m pleased that David Bearman (conference co-chair) response when he read the paper was that it should be discussed in a Professional Forum at the conference. Indeed David’s comment on the paper was “it sounds like it could be the most amazing session at MW this year” :-)

The paper suggests that openness can include open standards, open source, open APIs, open access and an open culture (i.e. a willingess to encourage user-generated content). But the paper also acknowledges that there is a downside to each of these aspects. Some of these concerns were raised by Nick Poole, Chief Executive of the MDA in a thread on “The speculative aspect of using Web 2″ on the MCG JISCMail list. Nick commented:

… ‘how can you be so naïve’? Low cost of entry? We were promised that with Open Source Software and it turned out to be no cheaper. Reaching audiences while we sleep? They told us Z39.50 and interoperability would solve that and we’re still not there. Content Management will make everyone a publisher? You just try and get a username and password out of the Council IT Admin.

I’m pleased that Nick raised such concerns. He’s right when he suggests that the potential benefits of both open source and open standards have been over-hyped. And, similarly, the benefits of Web 2.0 can also be exaggerated. But my response to the concerns raised by Nick are to argue that we need to develop more sophisticated ways of engaging with these aspects of openness - and just because policy makers appear to feel that simply mandating use of open standards and open source software will be sufficient to deliver their benefits, doesn’t mean we are faced with the binary choice of accepting or rejecting such views. Rather we need to engage in discussions and debate on ways in which real benefits can be realised.

I’ve been involved in working collaboratively with others in developing models for exploiting the potential of open standards and open source software. At the Museums and the Web 2.007 conference I presented a paper on Addressing The Limitations Of Open Standards, co-authored with my colleague Marieke Guy and Alastair Dunning (then of AHDS). These ideas were further developed and extended to include open source and an open access in a paper on Openness in Higher Education: Open Source, Open Standards, Open Access co-authored by Scott Wilson (JISC CETIS) and Randy Metcalfe (then of JISC OSS Watch).

But there’s a need to build on these approaches and to develop approaches for exploiting other aspects of openness. And such approaches need to recognise the dangers and difficulties. But just because there are difficulties, doesn’t mean we should reject openness - rather it means we need to continue having the debate, whether it’s on mailing list such as the MCG list, on this blog or at the professional forum at the Museums and The Web 2008 conference. So I’ll ask here the questions w’ll be discussing in a few day’s time: what does openness mean to your community, what are the benefits it can provide, what are difficulties which are likely to be faced and, most importantly, how do you feel such difficulties should be overcome.

Your feedback is warmly welcomed.

Losing My Religion

I discovered the Web in December 1992 and, after Christmas, helped to set up the institutional Web site at the University of Leeds. Later that month I met Robert Cailliau, a colleague of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, when Robert was in Leeds visit relatives. Robert gave me the background to the developments of the Web and it was around that time I subscribed to the www-talk mailing list. This was the start of my belief in a Web based on standards developed by an open community.  And I can remember the controversy caused when NCSA, in their development of the Mosaic browser, broke with the consensus in the format of the IMG tag. Marc Andreessen made a proposal which generated debate. However Marc chose to ignore Tim’s suggestions:

Tim Berners-Lee writes:
> Let the IMG tag be INCLUDE and let it refer to an arbitrary document
> type. Or EMBED if INCLUDE sounds like a cpp include which people
> will expect to provide SGML source code to be parsed inline — not
> what was intended.
We’re not prepared to support INCLUDE/EMBED at this point; it raises a
number of nasty issues that are quite separate from the idea of
inlined images.

What happened was that Mosaic was released to universal acclaim. But later, when the lack of extensibility of the IMG tag became apparent, the Netscape browser was released and introduced a more effective way of embedding content other than images, using the EMBED tag. And Marc promoted supported support for this proprietary tag over the limited IMG tag as a killer feature of Netscape.  Similar tactics which Microsoft have been guilty of over the years.

It’s not just Microsoft, you have to be wary of software vendors in general as they all have vested interests in proprietary lock-in, has been my belief over the years. Stick with the W3C, I’ve felt. They are independent of vendors and will be best positioned to provide open standards which everyone can use, I’ve argued over the years.

But over time I’ve begun to question the wisdom of this view. I raised this issue last June in a post entitled “Are W3C Crazy?” in which I picked up on a comment made by Phil Wilson, a Web developer based at the University of Bath. Phil told me, based on his attendance at the XTech 2007 conference that:

There seemed to be a couple of big fat W3C elephants in the room.

The first was that the w3c are doing stuff for use in five or ten years’ time whereas most of the other talks are about things you can do today or next year, which makes them seem like futurologists.

The other is that they really didn’t seem that happy that HTML5 was going ahead, and what the hell was wrong with XHTML2 anyway?

It must be nice to work in a standards organisation where everything you do meets some Platonic Idea of perfection.

Are W3C working in a purist world in which everything needs to meet a Platonic idea of perfection? Others, including long standing Web standards evangelists, seem to be raising similar concerns. Molly (of Molly.com, a well-known author of dozens of books on Web standards) is the latest to raise her concerns. In a post on “From Web Standards Diva to Web Standards Devo“ she makes a startling suggestion:

I’m going to design my new site with frames, tables, spacer gifs, lots of flash embedded into framed pages via iframes. I’m going to use non-semantic, presentational HTML, table based layouts, and lots of inline CSS.

The frightening issue is that I can build such a site so it will validate, pass at least WCAG priority 1 accessibility and have effective SEO.

However she goes on to say:

The mere fact that I can actually do all that and be in compliance with specs should help clarify my point, I hope. It’s not the specs that define Web Standards. We are talking about best practices. We use the term “standards” fast and loose, and for an industry that is so interested in semantics, I find it endlessly ironic that we have chosen such a piss poor description to define a certain level of professional practices.

This post is a follow-up from one on “Web Standards Aren’t” which, as with many of Molly’s posts, succeeds in generating much debate, including contributions from some of the leading lights in Web standards development work.

I met Molly at the W4A 2005 conference when I gave a paper on “Forcing Standardization or Accommodating Diversity? A Framework for Applying the WCAG in the Real World“. This was my radical paper in which I suggested, to a room full of Web accessibility experts, that Web accessibility wasn’t about conforming with a technical set of universal standards, but in identifying best practices which would support users in the particular tasks they were engaged in. Molly, who I didn’t know at the time, supported various comments I made at the conference, which led to various late night drinking sessions at the conference (but I won’t go into that!)

And now Molly is taking the debate even further. and other leading standards-based developers are raising similar concerns, such as Andy Clark’s post dated 11 February 2008 on “transcending the web of today” in which he suggests:

Transcending is about moving away from outdated notions, for example that a design should look the same in all browsers. It is about designing the best possible visual experience for people using the best browsers (and then considering what happens for people using outdated technologies). This is the opposite of progressive enhancement where a designer would design for the most common, lowest common denominator browser (even it is the least capable), and then add extra visual decoration to reward people who use more modern software. Transcending about designing the best for the best.

If leading lights such as Molly and Andy (who have both published books on Web standards, given many prresentations on this topic and beern active in W3C working groups) are questioning the W3C vision, we should pay heed. Have W3C lost the authority they once had? Have the dangers posed by software vendors leading the development of standards simply been replaced by the dangers of a group of researchers and purists who are happy to develop  sophisticated solutions which may fail to gain acceptance in the marketplace?

It’s not longer just a question of passively accepting the vision of the standards developers, I’m afraid. And if you don’t believe me, tell me -do you think the future lies in W3C’s XHTML 2 standard (July 2006 draft) or W3C’s HTML 5 standard (hmm, latest draft came out on 11 February 2008)? If there’s a schism within W3C and W3C Consortium Members such as Microsoft, Sun, Opera and Google, which sect will you follow? Or do you feel the need to avoid the religious wars and join the agnostics?

TechWatch Report on XML-based Office Document Standards

A JISC TechWatch report on XML-based Office Document Standards (TSW0702) has just been published.  As described on the TechWatch Web site:

This TechWatch report explains these issues and some of the standards involved. It proposes that although the UK higher and further education sector has, for a long time, understood the interoperability benefits of open standards, it has been slow to translate this into easily understandable guidelines for implementation at the level of everyday applications such as office document formats. As far as education is concerned, the use of modifiable office document formats has now reached a crucial stage. There is an urgent need for co-ordinated, strategically informed action over the next five years, if the higher education community is to facilitate a cost effective approach to the switch to XML-based office document formats.

The report, written by Walter Ditch,  (and featured in The Register and on ZDnet) provides a very useful background to the needs for open document formats, a discussion about what openness means in this context (which references two of my papers on “Openness in Higher Education: Open Source, Open Standards, Open Access” and “A Contextual Framework For Standards“) and provides a summary of the strengths and weakness of the Open Document Format (ODF) and the Office Open XML format (OOXML).

The report argues that it is now timely for the HE sector to address the issue of how we should move away from use of proprietary office file formats. The report doesn’t make a recommendation on which format(s) we should  adopt or on the deployment strategies we will need - and I think the report is wise in this respect, as any decisions taken now may be made redundant by decisions to be made by ECMA regarding the standardisation of OOXML in the near future.  However the report does provide very useful information which will help to inform future discussions.

Recommended reading for a topic which, as Paul Anderson, the technical editor of the report, says on his blog there is ”a searing debate about which particular XML format all these software packages should make use of and which standard they should use“.  Paul goes on to say “It’s an indication of how deeply these issues are felt and how bitter the XML standardisation battle has become. It really is a war of words.”  Paul’s editorial role and the peer-reviewing process for this report have helped to ensure that the content of the report provides a neutral summary of the background to the standardisation processes.

Use Of Open Standards In JISC Development Programmes

A recent update sent to the E-Framework JISCMail list contains the following summary of a paper written by myself, Scott Wilson (CETIS) and Randy Metcalfe (formerly of JISC OSS Watch) :

Openness in Higher Education: Open Source, Open Standards, Open Access

June 2007. Anyone wishing to make achieve a better understanding of the “open” agenda in higher education should read this recent paper by Brian Kelly, Scott Wilson, and Randy Metcalfe presented at the ELPUB2007 Conference on Electronic Publishing in Vienna. The “open” word is of course used by all of us in incredibly different contexts and as the authors note: “For national advisory services in the UK (UKOLN, CETIS, and OSS Watch), varieties of openness (open source software, open standards, and open access to research publications and data) present an interesting challenge.”

More information at: http://elpub.scix.net/data/works/att/140_elpub2007.content.pdf

This paper, which was presented by Scott Wilson at the ELPub 2007 conference, builds on previous work which has sought to address the tensions between the potential benefits which open standards can provide and the dangers of using standards which fail to gain acceptance in the marketplace, are too complex, are superceded by alternative approaches or are used too soon. The paper argues that there is a need to be flexible (in order, for example, to avoid repeating the mistakes made when the UK higher education community was committed to use of Coloured Book networking protocols as a stepping stone to OSI network standards - a decision which was eventually overturned by the success of Internet networking standards).

The paper describes the parallels with pragamatic and user-centred approaches to use of open standards with the selection and use of open source software and providing open access to scholarly publications and data. In all these cases there are clear benefits to be gained by the sector, but there are also a whole host of complications which would be foolish to ignore.

These issues are very pertinent to the current JISC call for projects in its Capital Programme. The JISC Circular 02/07 document (MS Word format) clearly states JISC’s commitment to open access:

B21: JISC supports unrestricted access to the published output of publicly-funded research and wishes to encourage open access to research outputs to ensure that the fruits of UK research are made more widely available.

and goes on to demonstrate a pragmatic approach to use of standards:

B25: JISC mandates the deposit of the native version (Word, PPT, etc.), with PDF as well if wanted, but certainly with a format from which usable xml can in principle be derived (not PDF).

The approach to use of open standards which JISC requires projects to take is clearly stated:

B29. The institution and its partners must use the technical standards stipulated by JISC and where unstipulated open standards wherever possible, Any deviation should be justified in the proposal and any alternative be designed with re-use by others in mind. Easy of interoperability between systems is key to the provision of next generation technologies for education and research, and projects are expected to work with JISC to address this issue. It is the responsibility of the lead institution to inform its project partners accordingly. Relevant standards can be founded in the JISC Standards Catalogue
http://standards.jisc.ac.uk/.

This paragraph provides the flexibility needed to address potential problems which use of open standards may cause. The requirement to document any deviations is important, and reflects the approach developed by UKOLN in its work (with AHDS) in providing a technical advisory service to support the NOF-digitise programme. As described in the paper A Contextual Framework For Standards for that programme a documented report on deviation from mandated open standards was required as part of the reporting process, and an accompanying FAQ was produced.

I hope this post will be of use to anyone who may be considered submitting a proposal to this call.

Are W3C Crazy?

Phil Wilson recently reported on his trip to the XTech 2007 conference. Phil’s report included a bullet point which said that “The W3C are crazy”. In response to my request for clarification Phil said that:

There seemed to be a couple of big fat W3C elephants in the room.

The first was that the w3c are doing stuff for use in five or ten years’ time whereas most of the other talks are about things you can do today or next year, which makes them seem like futurologists.

The other is that they really didn’t seem that happy that HTML5 was going ahead, and what the hell was wrong with XHTML2 anyway?

It must be nice to work in a standards organisation where everything you do meets some Platonic Idea of perfection.

I think it is clear that W3C have had a very purist approach to the development of Web standards. Indeed Chris Lilley admitted in a talk on HTML Reloaded at the WWW 2007 conference that “99.99999% of the Web was invalid HTML. W3C pretended that didn’t exist. “

The W3C’s purist position is under pressure from companies such as Mozilla and Google, who feel that it is foolish to ignore that Web environment as it is today and build a new version of XHTML which is incompatible with HTML 4 and XHTML 1. Instead these companies, together with others who wish to build on existing tehcnologies, have been pushing evolutionary development of HTML 4, under the name HTML 5.

Under such pressure, the W3C has been forced to back both camps, with the chartering of a HTML Working Group (which will develop HTML ‘classic’) and a XHTML 2 Working Group.

Despite this concession, I feel that there is a culture at W3C which is uncomfortable will the need to address real world constraints and, as Phil describes it, prefers a world  which conforms to a “Platonic Idea of perfection“.

Are W3C crazy? No, not crazy, I would say, but idealist - and perhaps teasing the user community with a vision of perfection which is unlikely to be realised. And when Phil states they are “doing stuff for use in five or ten years’ time” it would seem he underestimates the timescales, as the WHATWG FAQ states, in response to a question on when HTML 5 will be finished: ”Around 15 years or more to reach a W3C recommendation (include estimated schedule)“. 

Open Standards - Are We There Yet?

When will all the open standards we need be finalised? What will happen when that day arrives?  And are we there yet?

Daft questions, you may be thinking.  But if that’s the case - and we’ll never arrive at a position in which the open standards we need are all done - what does this mean for the development community?  Is the seemingly never-ending development of standards simply a way of providing ‘jobs for the boys’ - so that software developers and standards developers will be guaranteed of a job?

Or, to ask a related question, are the standards which are available today good enough for most uses.  Andy Powell, in the eFoundations blog, raised this issue recently when he commented “I’m very mindful of the tension between the relatively complex … and the relatively simple, tag-based, approaches taken by Web 2.0 repository-like applications such as Slideshare and Scribd.“

Andy went on to admit that “Unfortunately, I lean uncomfortably in both directions!“  I think that many of us involved in development work would admit to similar doubts - and perhaps those who have no doubts are those with a blinkered vision who were responsible for leading the UK HE sector down the cul de sac of Coloured Book network protocols in the 1980s.

What should be done?

Addressing The Limitations Of Open Standards

Open standards are great - they can provide machine- and application-independence, thus avoiding vendor lock-in and they can help to ensure services are interoperable and are widely accessible. Unfortunately open standards don’t always work - they can be too ambitious, fail to gain market acceptance, may be too costly to implement or be superceded by alternatives. So how do development programmes ensure they make use of open standards which will be successful and avoid making costly mistakes when selecting standards? This is the theme of a paper on “Addressing The Limitations Of Open Standards” by myself, my colleague Marieke Guy and Alastair Dunning, AHDS which will be given at the Museums and the Web 2007 Conference on 12 April.

The paper and accompanying slides are available. Your comments are welcome.

Technorati Tags: MW2007

Blogs or Email for Discussions?

I recently sent an email about a bug in the Feed Validator software hosted at W3C. The bug was quickly identified. This was great, but made me think about the QA process for the software and the faith which is placed on validators - issues which I addressed in a recent posting.

A discussion continued on the QA list, with Olivier posted his thoughts on the W3C QA blog. Some concerns were raised, however, regarding the fragmentation of the discussion:

<off-topic>
> Seeing as everyone is commenting on weblogs…
> http://www.w3.org/QA/2007/02/bugs_and_qa.html

No, I don’t have one of those. Anyway, it doesn’t seem to be working.
Three people have put comments on this topic on to their separate blogs.
And there is no linking between them (as far as I can see) except for this mailing list.
</off-topic>

Subsequently I’ve found that Sam Ruby has posted a response on his blog and the Crossnet blog has a posting on RSS Validator in the Spotlight.

Is Barry right to be concerned about such fragmentation? I would argue that fragmentation can provide benefits: in this case the discussion is not locked within the minority world of the W3C WWW-QA list, but has been opened up to other communities who may have other perspectives (e.g. the Crossnet blog will be seen by members of the publishing community many of whom won’t be interested in discussion on the WWW-QA list). In addition this diversity also enables differing perspectives to be raised - the posting on the Crossnet blog, for example, has provided an opportunity to highlight the robustness of the core RSS spec and to address the issues concerning the importance of test cases to standards, such as PRISM, of particular interest to the publishers:

Good point, anyway about contributing test cases. I guess we should really submit a PRISM test case. And yes, the Validator is somewhat buggy as some recent testing confirms. On which more later.

I would argue that such diversity outweights the dangers of fragmenting the discussion - and that it is possible to pull together related discussions by, as I’ve done here, linking to them.

Is possible splintering of discussions on email lists a legitimate reason to have a downer on blogs? What do other think?

Validators Don’t Always Work

Background

A standard of much interest to us at UKOLN is RSS. We came across RSS in its very early days: I gave a workshop session on Automated News Feeds at the national Institutional Web Management Workshop back in June 2001 and Andy Powell, a former colleague, included RSS is the JISC Information Environment technical architecture.

Problem

I recently discovered that UKOLN RSS feed did not validate, according to the Feed validation service hosted at the W3C. The error appeared to be with the <taxo> modul, but a colleague was convinced that the feed was fine and the problem was with the RSS validator. I was sceptical (surely an open source validation service, hosted at W3C, can’t have a bug in such a fundamental area) and raised this issue on the web-support JISCMail list. Sebastian Rahtz pointed out errors in the examples given in the RSS specification, which made me wonder whether the specification itself was flawed. When I found out that our news feed was created by the RSS::XML module, I wondered if the error could possibly be in this module.

Solution

I raised this issue on the W3C’s QA list, asking whether the problem was with (a) our RSS feed; (b) the RSS specification; (c) the application used to generated the feed or (d) the RSS validator. I received a prompt response from Olivier Thereaux (first thing the following morning) which confirmed that our feed was fine; that there were errors in the RSS specification (in particular in an example included in the spec) but that the fundamental error was due to a bug in the validator. This was reported to Sam Ruby, the developer of the validator who, a few hours later, implemented a patch and released this on the main Feed Validator site.

Discussion

I was very impressed with the speed with which this problem was addressed and a solution deployed. Many thanks to Olivier and Sam for this.

I was, though, also very shocked that a validator for such a widely deployed standard (RSS 1.0) had such bugs (I bet a colleague a pint, later raised to a gallon, that the validator was fine - luckily he didn’t take me up on this!). I had assumed that:

• The development process would have spotted this bug (through use of test cases, code walk-throughs, schema validation, etc.)
• The development community would have spotted bugs in an open source applications, through the ‘many eyes make all bugs shallow’ principle.
• The W3C QA processes would have detected this problem prior to the installation of the service on the W3C Web site.

A colleague pointed out that software developers (which I am not) tend not to have so much faith in validators, and many important and widely deployed applications have bugs.

I am not the only person to have concerns over the lack or resources allocated to this important area: Bjoern Hoehrmann left the W3C QA in July 2006, sending a message to the public-qa-dev list giving his reasons for leaving the group.

Where, then, does this leave me? How can I advise others of the importance of validation and of systematic QA processes if such processes don’t seem to be in place with the W3C? Should I stop writing and giving talks on this (I suspect people’s eyes do glaze over when they hear me harping on about this issue).

But on the other hand, if digital library development programmes are being funded on the assumption that the data and formats are ‘clean’ aren’t services going to break, if this isn’t the case?

And perhaps I’m being over-dramatic over this one incident - the problem may have been an obscure one and at least the bug detected a false negative (it reported that a valid RSS file was invalid) rather than a false positive. And, as I said, the bug was fixed very speedily. So maybe I should continue to promote the importance of compliance with standards - but the wider development community should help to validate the validators. And for formats owned (or, as in the case of RSS 1.0, closely affiliated with) W3C, the W3C QA Interest Group has demonstrated that concerns don’t disappear down a black hole.

Technorai tags: validators validation

Christmas Quiz - An Answer

In my Christmas Quiz posting I asked which of the following are open standards:

Flash PDF RSS 1.0 RSS 2.0 MS Word

Before giving my thoughts on this, I will comment on the responses.

Your Responses

James Brown felt that “first, my definition of an open standard: publicly available and able to be implemented such that two or more different uses of the standard will be compatible and accessible.” He then went on to apply that rule to the examples I gave and felt that each of them had characteristics of openness but not completely so.

Phil Wilson felt gave his “definition of an open standard: publicly available and able to be implemented such that two or more different uses of the standard will be compatible and accessible.“

Ravis Reddick thinks that “Flash itself isn’t the standard, it’s the official authoring tool and general brand name for the technology. Other authoring tools can author ‘Flash’; the export format is various version of Shockwave Flash. I think this can now be authored in an open way using an intermediary format“

Kevin Ashley’s view is that “Flash, PDF and more recent versions of MS Word are all open in the sense that the file format is published, and it is possible to create tools to read/render content in those formats using nothing except the published standards.” He went on to add that “All of them are not open in the sense that new versions of the formats can be created at the whim of the company that owns them.” Although he is “not so worried about that; if I don’t like PDF 1.7 because of some new license twist, I won’t use it. All the stuff I already have in PDF 1.x (x“.

And finally Steve Nisbett feels that “PDF, FLASH and MS may well be seen as ’standard’ - available all over the place, but they are certain not Open.“

My Views

I can recall back in 1993-4 having similar discussions about open standards. Back then I can recall arguing that a system such as the Web because of the:

• Open standards.
• Client software was available on a variety of platforms.
• Service software was available on a variety of platforms.

There were a number of other bullet points (which I have forgotten) but I do recall that my definition was used in a response to other systems which were competing with the Web (and in my opinion where inferior to the Web). These included such as the Guide hypertext system, developed at the University of Kent and Microcosm, an “Open Hypermedia Environment for Information Integration” developed by Professor Wendy Hall and colleagues at the University of Southampton. As these products were being pushed in 1992/3 as potential alternatives to the Web (and came from well-established Computer Science departments with good reputations for the quality of their research) I came up with my definition of openness, which I gave at a day’s workshop on Hypertext Systems On Unix Platforms at the University of Kent back in 1993 (it was originally intended, I think, as a promotional events for Guide, and I was the token person describing at alternative approach!) However my definition of openness was clearly not an open definition - it was intended to embrace my preferred solution, at the expense of the competitors. I’m aware that others take a similar approach (which all too often seems to resolve to “an open standard is one that Microsoft have no involvement in, no matter how proprietary it may be!”).

The respondents to this quiz take a more honest approach, I’m pleased to find.

So what are my thoughts?

The examples I used were taken from a presentation of a paper on A Contextual Framework For Standards which I gave at the “Workshop on E-Government: Barriers and Opportunities” which was held in Edinburgh in May 2006. The opening speaker at the workshop was Ivan Herman of the W3C (and currently the lead of the W34C’s Semantic Web activity). In his presentation Ivan cited an EU definition of openness:

• The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit organization
• The standard specification document is available either freely or at a nominal charge
• The intellectual property of the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty free basis
• No constraints on the re-use of the standard.

Shortly after Ivan’s talk I delivered my slides, and, as can be seen, I asked the audience (which included not only Ivan Herman, but also Steve Bratt, CEO of W3C) which of the following were open standards:

XHTML    Flash     PDF     Java     RSS 1.0     RSS 2.0     MS Word

There was universal agreement that XHTML was an open standard and Flash, PDF, Java and MS Word weren’t. But there was ambivalence over both versions of RSS - it may be based on XML - but there are uncertainties over the governance of the standards. As Phil Wilson commented:

RSS 2.0 is published but there is a strict copyright on the usage of the term, and no-one apart from Dave Winer may make changes to it (“Someone has to have the last word, and when it comes to the RSS 2.0 roadmap, that’s me”, “I am banging the gavel”).

Related concerns have been raised over the future development of RSS 1.0. I would argue, therefore, that RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 fail the EU’s definition according to the “will be maintained by a not-for-profit organization” - neither seems to being adequately maintained.

Tavis Reddick mentioned that “The question isn’t clear about what is the standard: the interface, the file format, the information model…? I took it to mean something like the data binding format.“

It should be noted that the EU’s definition of a open standards relates to the openness and the governance of the standard itself - it is silent on issues such as the openness of tools to support its usage.

What does this mean to policy makers, developers, funders and users with digital library development programmes? One response is “nothing, this is just splitting hairs”. But if our mantra is “Interoperability through open standards” then surely we need to have an agreed understanding and definition of ‘open standards’? Oleg Liber, Director of CETIS touched on this issue in his talk at the recent JISC-CETIS Conference. His slides reviewed CETIS historical involvement with educational technology standards:

• 1998-1999: Educational technology interoperability standards?
• 2000-2005: Educational technology interoperability standards!
• 2006-2011: Educational technology? Interoperability? Standards?

From the certainties we held at the start of the new century, we are now beginning to challenge some of our basic assumptions.

“Interoperability? Standards?” or “Interoperability! Standards!”? What is your view?

Merry Christmas

Brian

Reflections On 2006 - Standards

This year has seen UKOLN building on its work on ways in which standards can be used to support digital library development programmes. In the past a simplistic approach had been taken, which assumed that standards developed by trusted standards bodies (W3C, IETF, ISO, etc.) would become widely accepted within the market place. This approach, however, has failed in the past (Coloured Book software anyone?) and we currently are seeing a wide range of debates over standards across the Web development community (Web Services Considered Harmful; RSS vs RSS vs Atom debates; the Semantic Web vs the lower case semantic web and microformats and, more recently, a radical vision for the future based on XHTML 2.0 vs an evolutionary development towards HTML 5.0 - as described in Molly Holzschlag’s Blog) .

UKOLN’s contribution to the debate has been the development of a contextual three-layered approach, based on a neutral standards catalogue (containing details of standards, their governance; their maturity and a risk assessment) together with policy layers for selecting relevant standards and for managing non-compliance with the policies. This approach, which has been designed to provide a level of flexibility which is needed in a rapidly changing technical environment is supported by an advocacy strategy (which promotes the benefits of open standards) and an iterative feedback and development approach (in order to learn from patterns of best practices).

We have sought to develop our ideas and gain feedback by papers which have been submitted to a number of peer-reviewed conferences. In May a paper on A Contextual Framework For Standards was presented at the “Workshop on E-Government: Barriers and Opportunities” which was co-located with the International World Wide Web Conference held in Edinburgh.

My colleague Marieke Guy has been engaged in implementing the system which is based on our contextual model. It was pleasing when Marieke and I met with members of the eReSS project to discover that they had taken a similar approach in the area of e-science standards.

This contextual approach has been designed to be usable by the wider community. The information provided in the standards catalogue has a Creative Commons licence associated with the entries, so there should be no legal barriers to the reuse of the content. This will enable developers, policy makers, managers, etc. within institutions to make use of the resources to support institutional development activities. More importantly from a JISC perspective, the approach can be used by JISC’s partners in the Strategic E-Content Alliance (SEA). The SEA is an alliance of bodies such as JISC, MLA. BBC and Becta, which aims to provide seamless access for the public to a wide range of scholarly, cultural and educational resource. The contextual approach to the selection and use of open standards is particularly relevance in this content as, though the bodies will seek agreement where possible on relevant standards, there will be areas in which organisational or political considerations may outweigh technical factors.

Next year will see UKOLN continuing to build on this work - and we are particularly pleased that a paper on Addressing the Limitations of Open Standards has been accepted at the Museums and the Web 2007 conference.

Christmas Quiz II

Another quiz for Chrismas.

The current version of HTML is XHTML 1.1. What is the next version likely to be:

XHTML 1.2 XHTML 2 HTML 5

Feel free to add your comments.

Christmas Quiz

A quiz for Christmas.

Which of the following are open standards:

Flash     PDF     RSS 1.0     RSS 2.0     MS Word

As a follow-up, give reasons why the opposite of what you said may be true.

Please use the comments box for your thoughts.