ECMAScript Harmony has been the big news of the week. It isn't hard to see why, the next version of JavaScript is going to affect us all, for a long time (even more than a presidents term!)

Alex Russell, John Resig, and myself got Brendan Eich and Arun Ranganathan on the phone to talk about the news. This is episode 2 of the Open Web Podcast (see the new website, and subscribe to the series, including via iTunes.)

The podcast is over an hour long and goes into a ton of detail covering a lesson on language design, politics and process, a lot of history, and hopefully the path to a positive future.

We have other postings going on in the community too. Douglas Crockford writes an opinion on how The Only Thing We Have To Fear Is Premature Standardization, Mike Chambers wraps up the thoughts of Adobe on ActionScript 3 and ECMAScript 4, and Alex Russell talks sense into the fallout.

Have you seen any interesting posts or thoughts on the news?

But fighting the web is like holding back the ocean; it will route around you or it will wear you down, but will never go away, and it will never tire or give up. Yet in spite of the futility of fighting the web, Silverlight is being positioned in opposition to the web, not in support of it

This is one of a few great quotes from DeWitt Clinton's post On Fighting the Web itself. DeWitt is a colleague at Google, one that I have shared offices with, and great conversations. He has very strong ethics, but at the same time is very practical. But, back to his writing.

This is not a post saying "the Open Web rules and the proprietary Web is evil". If you actually read this carefully you see a very interesting argument that covers:

We can't be blind:

The short answer is that the technology behind Silverlight, and most certainly the company creating it, has the potential of changing how the web itself works.

The Web has strengths, but man it is tough to work with:

If you’re a web developer then you’ve felt the acute pain involved in writing applications inside the browser. Even armed with the most state-of-the-art toolkits, such as jQuery, Dojo, etc., you’re still limited to the available runtime of HTML, CSS, and JS, and worse, the absolute morass of cross-browser incompatibilities and restricted access to native client-side capabilities. I remain in awe of what people have accomplished in this environment, but I’m sad that this is all we’ve been able to accomplish so far.

Man, if the client is involved... evolution is slooooow:

The web revs slowly. Very, very slowly. In 10 years we’ve seen virtually no meaningful advances in the the ubiquitous web client; just a painful slog forward as web developers learn to eek out just a little more functionality in a constrained environment. Progress is slow because revving the ubiquitous client requires the coordination of multiple parties, not all of whom have shown consistent interest in working together to move the web forward.

There is some hope for an Open Web-style speedup:

More recently we’ve seen some earnest attempts at breaking that cycle. Rather than wait for the entire web to catch up, projects like Gears seek to rev the client from the inside out. It may take several years for standards like HTML5 to be widely deployed, but if developers can gain a toehold inside the client and start forcing the issue immediately then we’ll quickly see what works and what doesn’t, and be that much more informed about what to standardize and adopt as part of the long-term web platform.

The proprietary folks have a huge advantage, as they can just innovate and run without getting consensus:

But there’s another approach, an approach best exemplified today by the Flash runtime, whereby one doesn’t seek to improve the web from the inside, but rather replace it entirely. Sure, technologies like Flash take advantage of the web via http-based delivery mechanisms and in that they run inside the browser, and yes, they can use network connections like anything else, but these alternate runtimes fundamentally divorce themselves from the web ecosystem, and in doing so gain a significant advantage, but at a cost.

In spite of circumventing the web — no, because they circumvent the web — these new runtimes have the potential of offering a far better developer experience, and hence, a far better user experience, then the least-common-denominator of the standard widely-deployed ubiquitous browser runtimes of today.

And, thus, the proprietary stuff can be very good indeed:

Which leads us to Silverlight: Silverlight is positioned to take the fork-and-forget approach to the web pioneered by Flash and bring to it an unprecedented wealth of technology and corporate might. With a better underlying runtime and VM, better tool support, far superior multi-language capabilities, and more marketing muscle, Silverlight has all the potential to make rapid and noticeable inroads over the next several months, cleaving a large section clean out of the web.

And the scary thing? That this isn’t entirely a bad idea. The browser itself is anemic, the dependency on a single language is a handicap, the security models simultaneously constricting and flawed, the development environments underpowered, and frankly, the whole ecosystem is deserving of a major disruption. We’ve lived too long thinking that what we have today is good enough.

And will get better, fast:

Granted, these technologies won’t be perfect at first. On the contrary, they might be slow, cumbersome to deploy, buggy, and feature deprived. But right now that doesn’t matter. The strategy is all about getting a wedge in place, a bit of leverage that can be used to further pry open a vector for escaping the existing ecosystem. And over time, as the technology improves and adoption grows, so will the size of that tear in the fabric of the web.

But, there is a reason why the Web does so well:

But fighting the web is like holding back the ocean; it will route around you or it will wear you down, but will never go away, and it will never tire or give up. Yet in spite of the futility of fighting the web, Silverlight is being positioned in opposition to the web, not in support of it.

Why in opposition to the web? This stems from the principle that the web is axiomatically defined as an open system, where the underlying technologies are resistant to the centralization of control, where the protocols and formats are extensible and malleable, and where the power to effect change is shared and distributed. The DNA of the web is one of ceding control, and of learning to work with, rather than against, the collective wisdom and power a larger community.

Whereas a development monoculture, a centralization of control, and a tight grasp on the ability to change and adapt, all stand against these basic ideals, and give rise to the forces that, given enough time, will erode and eat away at any temporary advantage gained.

A violation of these principles does not necessarily make for a bad technology, but it does make it something other than the web.

And finally, and this is so key, the answer isn't to try to destroy the innovation in Flash, Silverlight, and others. Instead, the biggest win will be for us to make technology from those worlds into the Web itself. If we can do that, I think it will be a win-win, and we will have a much better Web to show for it:

But the call to action here is not to go and try to fight the disruptive technology. On the contrary, the ideas are sound and the improvements are very much needed. No, the call is to discover ways in which these ideas can become a part of the web, rather than working to tear it apart.

I do not want to see ambitious attempts like these fail. Just the opposite — I want to see them succeed. But success on the web requires a different kind of DNA, the type of DNA that is difficult to adopt when one’s attention is focused on fighting the web itself.

Brad Neuberg got a huge amount of feedback on his call for a definition of the Open Web. He distilled that information and tried hard to come up with something that fits into one sentence, and ended up with this:

The Open Web is an interoperable, ubiquitous, and searchable network where everyone can share information, integrate, and innovate without having to ask for permission, accessible through a powerful and universal client.

His litmus test for this asks if the technology in question has:

• Composability The ability to innovate, link, contribute, search, and integrate without red tape, fear of a lawsuit, or having to ask "please?"
• Interoperability The ability for developers to interoperate without having to know of each others existence
• Ubiquity The ubiquity of a set of open technologies and services agreed upon by the widest possible community
• Universal Client Empowering and evolving the browser and web technologies as a universal client

This morning at that OSCON conference David Recordon of Six Apart will announce on stage the formation of the Open Web Foundation. The new foundation is about providing a home for the development and ratification of web-related standards efforts. The foundation will be focused on developing the technical specifications of protocols used for communication and inter-operability between applications on the web. The foundation will also set out the legal terms and best practices for the use and transport of both private and public data, and the usage of web services.

We first reported on the announcement on Tuesday of this week after Chris Saad, the co-founder of the Data Portability project wrote a post about the announcement. The Data Portability project is focused on the evangelism of data openness and transparency, while the new Open Web Foundation will be focused on implementation issues.

Yesterday at the F8 conference Facebook announced their support for the new foundation, and we have learnt that Google, MySpace, Six Apart, Plaxo and many others will also be supporting the new initiative. Google and Facebook now have an appropriate venue where they can resolve their differences and work on a standard way to have their users interact with each other between the Facebook Connect and OpenSocial platforms. The web foundation also provides the technical details, as well as policy details, on how such a relationship between companies and products could work.

Currently there is not much more at the Open Web Foundation outside of a lot of strong backing, a lot of strongly willed organizers and a lot of initiative. The foundation hopes that within the next few months after the announcement today they will be able to release their first set of work on data standards and formats.

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