Standards
a comic

Browserlandia
A Fairy Tale

Once upon a time, a young inventor named Tim created a thing he called a "browser".  It was made of pointy bits.  With the pointy bits, you could create whoziwhatsits.

 

Seeing that this was useful, and people began to set up little shops that made cute but very useful little  browsers too.

Each reasoned that really good whoziwhatsits needed even more pointy bits, and so they added some new ones.

Each reasoned that if you squint your eyes a little, a whoziwhatsits is kind of like a whatchamacallit, if only we add some more pointy bits.  So they did.

It seems that while everyone agreed generally 'pointy bits' are good - it was getting a little hard to tell what was a browser?

At one of these shops, another inventor thought "this would be much better with some squiggly bits" - and so he made his browser with both pointy bits, and squiggly ones.

The squiggly bits were indeed an instant hit, people realized this also helped them use browsers for making flitsihoobits, which are very useful for industry!

Pretty soon everyone was trying to add squiggly bits too.

And so the country decided that they needed a 'standard body' at which those with a significant interest in browsers could come together...

This body would have a large, round table at which everyone could come together, as equals and discuss and decide the good future of the commons - so that at least we could agree what pointy shapes a browser must be made of.  This would be good for everyone.

 

But the people who made the squiggly bits didn't like that body, so they made their own.

Since most browser makers now had both, they had to go to two sets of meetings... sigh.

 

 

 

 

One of the first things the people at the pointy bits table did was decide that browsers should also have "roundy bits" which would compliment the pointy bits.  If you have roundy bits, things are much prettier.

 

 

...and also that they should probably have a separate table because roundy bits are different.

And, indeed, it was good.  

 

 

Browsers became so important to the economy that the country came to be known as Browserlandia.

 

 

 

A small number of browser makers got very wealthy and became very famous.

 

Having standard pointy bits, and standard roundy bits, and standard squiggly bits provided new opportunities.

 

People began building new things from those bits that weren't even themselves actually browsers, and never would be!

 

The fair laws of the land, invited them to an equal seat at the respective tables, for the good of the commons.

 

 

 

 

.

But, in practice... The famous and wealthy merchants were "more equal".

If everyone else wanted to add a bit they didn't like, they could just say "no. we won't make that."

In practice, to have any chance at all, you needed one of them to support you.

Conversely, it seemed that they did whatever they wanted.

And they played political games

And sometimes it seemed as if one powerful merchant was simply getting lazy and holding the whole country back.

 

The revised,

more true,

considerably more boring edition

People from standards bodies who work for browser vendors are more like mediators.

Their organization has, you know, an org chart.

Each of them works in an organization that makes browsers (chrome, for example), within another organization (google).

Their own oganization is further subdivided into something like pointy bits, roundy bits and squiggly bits departments.

But those departments are themselves further subdivided - it's rare to work on "CSS" - rather you work on a _part_ of CSS.

People who work on standards largely simply mediate between 'everyone else' and some parts of their larger organizations..

In a very practical sense, this matters a lot, because budgets.

Everything requires time, and there's never enough.

Priorities must be decided, and practically speaking, these need to be balanced with organizational goals, internal goals, and available staff

Why does browser X not advance feature Y, 

but chooses to instead advance feature Z

often has less to do with what someone really _thinks_ than the fact that they have bandwidth for Z and not Y.

Why does nobody seem to want to work on, or even discuss, thing Q often is reflective of that as well.

It's not necessarily that they have a problem with it - it's frequently that they can't afford to.

While the web doesn't currently N, we have all of these things it _could_ do if it did is the biggest kind of rabbit hole that scares people off

We look to each other for signals, costs are spread out.  If another browser or someone has already done research, collected use cases, maybe has written a decent spec or prototype - it reduces my own cost of involvement.

 

It isn't cheap!

These take time.

• Research
• Use Cases
• Discussion
• Implementation ideas/reality checks/some idea of costs
• Spec
• Prototype proof
• Tests
• More Spec
• Further discussion, compromise
• More Spec
• More tests
• Bugs

Igalia

If you've used some of these...

• CSS Grid
• MathML 
• ResizeObserver 
• CSS Containment 
• Class fields
• Responsive Images Preloading
•  :marker
• white-space: break-space;
• ...

Once upon a time, there was a faraway country...

Everyone in Browserlandia came to rely somehow on browsers.

How do you think it got its name?

Over the years, people