....OK, look, to sit back and say, "well we follow the standard and everyone else needs to fix their site" is completely naive. It's just not going to happen as long as M$ controls the market. To try to force standards is fine, if you have the market share to throw around that kind of weight. But right now, Mozilla doesn't have the "weight" to do it and they need to bend a little now so that they get the share and have the "weight" later on to force the issues.
You have to face the reality that Microsoft, not the W3C, is calling the shots. It doesn't matter a whole hill of beans what the W3C says the standards are. The fact is, Microsoft, by virtue of their domination in the market place, ultimately controls what the standards are. In the minds of the majority of users out there (and sysadmins as well), Microsoft is the standard bearer that everyone else must rise to (or lower to depending on your point of view). History is littered with "standards" that died this way. Heck, I remember when "Betamax" was the standard. It worked better that VHS; had a better picture than VHS; where is it now?
Look at it from the sysadmins point of view. If they set up a server and it works for 80-90% of the people out there, they're gonna call it a day and go have beer. They aren't going to waste their time making sure it works for those 10-20%. It's just not worth it.
The same goes for the web designer. In order to make money (at least that's _my_ goal in life) they only have so much time to spend building a site. They know that IE accounts for the majority of users and so they're going to make sure the site looks good for IE and rest can switch or suffer. And they know it's easy for the users to switch since Windows and Mac (which account for better than 90% of the users out there) have IE already installed on their systems.
From the users point of view, they've been using IE all along and so that's what they're use to. Suddenly they switch to Mozilla and some sites don't look right or worse, don't load at all. Or they can't download files because the sysadmin hasn't set up the MIME types correctly and they wind up with 10MB of garbage on their screen. It's easy to switch back to IE (see above paragraph) and so they do because in their minds, IE works and Mozilla is broken.
-- Galen Rhodes [EMAIL PROTECTED] Journal: http://journal.the-chatter-box.com/users/grhodes
"Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative." - Oscar Wilde On Dec 7, 2003, at 12:17 PM, Allan Anderson wrote:
But surely the other side of the argument is worth considering: that encouraging standards will result in a WWW and software that works better together, thus making software do what users expect.
Old arguments on both sides. But where to draw the line, and should Camino deviate from the Mothership of Mozilla policy?
On Dec 7, 2003, at 8:54 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Standards are nice and all but users don't give a hoot about standards.---
All the users care about is that their software does what they expect it
to do.
Crystals are the Earth's way of telling you you're making too much money.
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