What I feel we all want, at least on the Mac, is a browser that is standards compliant (and I mean MS and W3C standards) that is faster than IE and more flexible than IE & Safari with excellent OS integration.
I feel that where MS standards and W3C standards diverge there should be an option for the users to choose which behavior they want. That's all anyone has wanted all along I think. But the attitude that we've seen from the powers that be is it's not going to happen and I think that's very short sighted and very sad.
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Galen Rhodes
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Journal: http://journal.the-chatter-box.com/users/grhodes
"Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative." - Oscar Wilde
On Dec 7, 2003, at 4:21 PM, David Lentz wrote:
Easy on the flames here, I'm trying to expand the discussion, not ram a point of view down your collective throats...
That said, consider the possibility that BOTH sides of this argument are equally valid -- on the one hand, if you're going to give up and just do whatever Microsoft wants you to (whatever your motivations -- my point here is about suborning your own drives to those of Microsoft), then why are you bothering with open source at all? Just go out and buy yourself that nice shiny beige Dell, have it preconfigured with XP and IE, suck it up and join the teeming masses.
On the other hand, if you're going to ignore the undeniable fact that Microsoft DOES rule the industry (even lacking that elusive "thought leadership"), and build tools that ONLY behave per the W3C, then you're just pissing into the wind.
The trick here, as I see it, is to design the product as best you can without regard to the market realities, then provide adaptations (preferences, hacks, menu choices, skins, whatever) to make the product play nice with the market realities to the greatest extent possible.
On the one hand, it's too bad that tabbed windows were implemented in the very convenient and very compatible manner in which they were, and not via a W3C change to HTML/XHTML. But consider how many devotees of tabbed browsing (and how many web sites browseable in this manner) there would be today if it had been done this way...
Food for thought... Camino developers should create the product with nice, well-documented exits and hooks to facilitate non-standard (i.e., outside the implementation envelope) additions to the product. Things like recognizing DMG files should be easily able to be handled by 3rd-party extensions. And (not being a developer myself) it may already be this way -- if it is, then people, quit yer growsing and get out there and CODE a fix that let's it behave the way you want it to. But if it doesn't support a plugins-for-the-masses facility, if you have to be a Cocoa developer working out of the Mozilla cvs tree, then all we have done is to create an open source product with blinders on -- kind of like what Apple does with its open source stuff. My way or the highway doesn't really fit the open source philosophy, but neither does suborning one's own vision to mob rule. There's got to be a middle ground here somewhere.
My 2 cents worth.
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