World Wide Web community fights back against iOS and Android

Stuart Corner
Friday, 27 January 2012 15:29

IT Industry - Strategy

As mobile applications running under proprietary platforms - iOS, Android, Windows, etc - proliferate the World Wide Web community has a vision to build equivalent functionality into the browser specifications so that application writers will have access to a much wider community without 'lock in' to any one platform.

Håkon Wium Lie, CTO at Opera Software, in an interview with iTWire in Sydney, said the World Wide Web community had now largely overcome its early hurdles of lack of standardisation and its main challenge now was the momentum behind platforms like iOS, which is a closed system, and even Android, which, he maintains, is still in practice tied to one vendor, Google.

(Wium Lie invented cascading style sheets (CSS) to which web pages owe much of their visual appearance. He was formerly with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and is still very actively involved in developing web standards. On his profile he says: "In English, my first name is unpronounceable, my middle name is shortened to a single letter, and my last name does not build confidence. I therefore go by the name howcome which, although grammatically dubious, is the closest pronounceable approximation. It also makes for great email addresses.")

"Standards are much more important now. Even Microsoft has been forced to do standards and they are now quite well supported on the Web," The real challenge now is not Microsoft's proprietary approach to the Web, it is the apps that you find on the Apple and Android devices.

"They are often web-centric in that they fetch and display information from the Web but they have a different user interface and the challenge for browsers is to be able to offer authors the same capabilities that the app developers have. But I have high hopes that the Web will be able to offer developers that same capability and the same opportunity to make money."

Wium Lie claimed that failure to achieve this openness would stifle innovation. "If we leave it to one company to own this and develop it further it forces consumers to buy that line of products and stops competition. We saw that in the 90s when Microsoft Windows had 90 plus percent of users and Microsoft owned the Office line of products. Innovation slowed to a glacial speed until the World Wide Web came along and shook things up," he said.

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