The OpenAjax Alliance establishes a Future Browser Feature Wish List to identify capabilities developers hope to see in next-generation browsers.
The OpenAjax Alliance has come up with a "Future Browser Feature Wish
List" that currently tallies 37 features that Web developers deem
necessary for future browsers to take the Web to the next level.
The group's goal is an ambitious one, but an important step in taking the
Web forward, as developers continue
efforts
to add new features to browsers and to standardize the browser platform.
Coach
Wei, founder and chairman of Nexaweb Technologies and chair of the
community effort at the OpenAjax Alliance called "Ajax Runtime Feature
Wish List," said, "From this initiative, it is clear that the
community is looking for 'better' browsers going forward with enthusiasm, and
also clear what the community is looking for. However, the gap from where we
are today and where we want to be is clear as well. There is a lot of work to
do. OpenAjax will continue to work on this, hopefully getting browser vendors
to listen to us."
Dylan Schiemann, CEO of
SitePen
and co-creator of the Dojo Toolkit, participated in the conception of the
feature wish list and said he hopes the OpenAjax Alliance "has enough
clout for browser vendors to take action."
Moreover, "If this makes a difference and causes browser vendors to
step up their game and deliver a browser that is better for developers and
users, then it will be worth the effort," Schiemann said. "If not,
well, then it will be like Mac Office 2008 all over again ... compatible but
not worth using unless you have to."
However, "To be fair, the list is not just Microsoft," Schiemann
said. "There are a number of great ideas on this list that are needed to
move the open Web forward and make it less 'hacky.' It would certainly allow
SitePen and Dojo to focus on building better apps rather than working around
browser limitations that developers have fought with for years."
Initially the OpenAjax Alliance had a list of 55 features on its wish list,
but whittled that down to 37. The top 10 most requested features, in order,
are: 2-D Drawing/Vector Graphics, Better Security for Cross-site Scripts,
Better APIs About Positioning and Styling, HTML DOM
(Document Object Model) Operation Performance in General, Better Support for
Rich Text Editing, The Two HTTP Connection Limit Issue, Better UI Layout
Support, Native JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) Parsing, Persistent
Connections Issue, and Video and Audio.
In a July 17 blog post about the wish list, Wei said, "Among all the
feature requests, 2-D Drawing/Vector Graphics is clearly the most desired
feature by the community. It received most votes (110 people voted for it), and
highest total score (842, over 10 percent higher than the second feature
request)."
In addition, Wei said browser teams should look at the entire list of
requested features:
Although we have identified the top 10
feature requests, the browser teams should study the entire list because all
features might represent critical requirements or are just great ideas for
advancing the Web. It is possible that some of the features that received fewer
votes are critical to a particular but important niche or that only a subset of
participants is close enough to the bleeding edge to see an impending but
critical requirement.
Wei also said the next step for the wish list effort is to communicate with
browser vendors. "We have had calls with some of the browser vendors such
as the Microsoft IE [Internet Explorer] team during Phase I" of the
project, he said. "OpenAjax Alliance will try to get in touch (or
continue) the dialogue with browser vendors to convey what the community is
looking for."
Moreover, on the issue of graphics, Wei said:
AJAX developers today are achieving
astoundingly rich graphics effects through clever techniques leveraging
JavaScript, CSS, image, and whatever vector graphics
features they can find-usually, SVG [Scalable Vector Graphics], VML [Vector
Markup Language] and Canvas-but browser differences are a major pain point
among AJAX developers. Mozilla, WebKit and Opera support both Canvas and SVG
with good interoperability (although Mozilla does not yet support SVG animations).
IE is the holdout. The call to action is for all browsers, particularly IE, to
support both of the industry standards for 2-D vector graphics, SVG (the DOM-based standard) and Canvas (the
procedural-based standard).
Meanwhile, there were six new features that came along too late for the
community to vote on their relative importance. The six new features are ECMA4
JavaScript2, Field to input multiple files, Allow JavaScript access to file
upload statistics, Allow user finer control over rich content than JavaScript
On/Off, Memory Footprint and Enforce semantic tagging of data transmitted from
browser.
"I'm for anything that gets the Web to move forward faster, and in my
discussions with browser vendors over the past couple of years it has become evident
that high-quality prioritization information from AJAX developers is important
in helping them make decisions," said Alex Russell, co-creator of the Dojo
Toolkit and head of the Dojo Foundation, which is a member of the OpenAjax
Alliance. "Lots of people want lots of things from browsers, which makes
it difficult for browser vendors to know what to take seriously."
Russell added, "I think the OpenAjax Alliance
list is important since it represents the needs of many of the developers and
vendors who are pushing browsers to their current limits. In many cases, the
features on the list are a plea for ubiquity and not just a single vendor to
implement, and those things should weigh doubly on the minds of product
managers at the browser-producing organizations."
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