Microsoft: Learning to Play Nice in the OpenAjax Alliance

There was a time when the word "standard" referred to a common custom or practice among members of an industry or society, or a set of minimum guidelines of quality upon which a device was built. After the browser wars of the 1990s, the term lost much of its distinct meaning. Manufacturers came together to intentionally develop standards, and then one powerful manufacturer countered by successfully deploying a Web browser whose underlying technologies set their own standards.

Having emerged from that era, it's difficult for us to reconcile the original concept of the standard with what it has come to mean in practice. Is a standard something that a majority of manufacturers settle upon well in advance of a device's or a software product's creation? Or is it something that the largest quantity of users adopt, whether by their own design or by someone else's?

It is this question that has been on the mind of the charter members of the OpenAjax Alliance - a group of manufacturers who are working to produce standards that govern the use of Asynchronous JavaScript (AJAX) in Web development. AJAX architecture is shifting much more of the Web application logic from the server to the client - where many believe it belonged to start with. What the Alliance's members were considering up until two weeks ago was whether the entry of AJAX's two most prominent proponents and tools distributors, Google and Microsoft, would actually end up steering the standards process the wrong way.

But when the Alliance was founded a year ago, its creators openly stated its intention was not so much to develop a standard as to compel the producers of AJAX development tools to agree upon a common implementation, such that one vendor's AJAX edition is generally compatible with another's, and that a developer using one vendor's tools may produce code that is manageable by another developer using another vendor's tools. That seemed reasonable enough, though there was at least concern (in fairness, not yet rising to the level of outright fear) that one powerful vendor might steer the process in its own direction.

Those concerns were raised by the respected Mozilla developer John Lesig last February. Mozilla has had an interest in the Alliance, though has not yet fully joined. Lesig's concern was that the Alliance was becoming corporate in nature, having signed up 66 commercial enterprises and 2 open source institutions by February 22. He cited a portion of the Alliance's charter which appeared to restrict open source groups' membership to those entities that are verifiably non-profit. "The very fact that no non-legally-backed entities exist in the alliance (and the fact that no good corporation would sign a legal agreement ambiguously defining the status of an "organization")," Lesig wrote, "leads me to believe that many of today's popular JavaScript libraries are intended to be left out of the drafting of the OpenAjax requirements."

While Lesig's intention appeared to be to raise concerns about the Alliance's seemingly unfair restrictions against open source involvement, the effect - as seen in the response to his original blog posting, and in the blog discussions thereafter - was to call attention to the specter of corporate influence over a standards process. This despite the fact that the Alliance was not chartered to develop a standard in the first place, and despite that IBM - in recent years an opponent of Microsoft in many endeavors - had led the effort to invite Microsoft into the group last year, and expressed optimism after it finally accepted the invitation two weeks ago.

During the 1990s, Microsoft was accused of circumventing the Web standards process in an attempt to hard-wire the Web around its own "standards." It was at this time the once-oxymoronic phrase "proprietary standard" was coined. The basis for many of those accusations, as was determined in the US antitrust case against Microsoft, turned out to be justified.

So even when the company goes so far as to hire respected standards advocates such as Chris Wilson (who now heads the W3C's HTML Working Group for Microsoft) and Molly Holzschlag, formerly with the Web Standards Project, on account of its past behavior, it seems the company can't catch a break. As Web developer Roger Johansson wrote after it was learned Wilson would be leading the W3C's new HTML effort, "Microsoft...time and time again has shown a total lack of respect for Web professionals and Web standards, and has no credibility whatsoever among the people who will be using the new HTML specification."

And as Holzschlag herself acknowledged in a response to a BetaNews article, Microsoft's corporate influence and the interest of Web standards can run contrary to one another, specifically with regard to her work during 2006 as a Web Standards Project advocate. "There is a definite split between the technology and business agendas there," she wrote, "and of course business will influence any tech decisions, for good or bad. Hey, that's Microsoft. We all know that!"

Meanwhile, in recent weeks, Google has gone so far as to publicly pronounce that the entire notion of Asynchronous JavaScript is to bypass a standard. "AJAX is not defined by standards," Google project manager Bret Taylor is quoted as saying, "but by abusing standards."

So how does Microsoft proceed with regard to its participation in the OpenAjax Alliance, which could soon become one of the most diverse organizations in all of software development especially if Mozilla and Yahoo formally join? BetaNews spoke at length to Microsoft's Keith Smith, whose full formal title (be prepared) is Group Product Manager, Web Client and User Experience Platform and Tools Team. Just the title itself casts a spotlight on the tightrope Microsoft finds itself walking.

We reminded Smith of a genuine problem facing the Alliance, which Mozilla's Lesig cited in his February blog post: One methodology for having JavaScript "listen" for user events, under consideration for the OpenAjax Hub, involves a method best suited to Internet Explorer and not Firefox or Opera. Now that Microsoft's a member of the Alliance, how should it proceed? Should it propose alternatives? Or should it enable other members to propose alternatives and then support them?

Smith's answer was essentially that Alliance members won't really be able to grasp problems such as this, related to IE, unless Microsoft participates. "I think Microsoft really set an example by, one, just showing up, being part of the discussion, the free exchange of ideas among the various industry leaders and the vendors who are delivering either browsers or AJAX frameworks," Smith told BetaNews. "Our membership in the OpenAjax Alliance actually helps facilitate those discussions so that we can start the dialog, get all the issues on the table, understand what the priorities are, and work jointly with the other members of the Alliance to a mutual solution that benefits a broad cross-section of developers."

Smith then demonstrated he understood the intended purpose of the OpenAjax Hub. "If someone takes a solution that's built with, say, the Dojo framework [JavaScript toolkit], and they want to add some additional ASP.NET elements to it, say, with our application services on the back end for profile and membership," he explained, "then the Hub would make sure there aren't any conflicts or collisions across namespaces, and that events are directed to their appropriate components; and then from the user's perspective, things are loading as efficiently as possible, in the order that the developer intends. So it gives the developer more control, and it sets the guidelines for how all the frameworks should play well together."

Next: Microsoft on standards as a starting point for Web development