On Sun, 9 Apr 2000, Benjamin Scott wrote:
> > Exactly. Which is why I vote to stick to LCD standards.
>
> <OFFTOPIC><PEDANTIC>
>
> You mean GCF (Greatest Common Factor), that is, the highest level of
> functionality supported among all involved. From mathematics, where
> the GCF is
NO, actually, I don't. I mean LCD (or something reasonably approximating
it). My web pages, if you've ever seen any of them, tend to be VERY
simple, and lack all the flash of commercial web pages. The most advanced
feature I'm likely to use is a table here and there. Lots of browsers
support a variety of more complex features... I don't use any of them.
> > I personally prefer function over form 97.325% of the time (yeah I have to
> > be different) so I'd rather make the page a little less pretty and more
> > standards conformant.
>
> Me too. But I'm an engineer, not a media arts type. :-)
I left that in just because I like it... :)
> >> Maybe that will change as people are forced to re-implement their pages
> >> over and over again as more and different user agents (browsers) hit the
> >> scene.
> >
> > I'd like to see it, but I doubt it. People often learn from their
> > mistakes, but history has shown that societies as a whole don't.
>
> Society doesn't have to; just management, when they find you re-implementing
> your company webpage six times a year for eleven different browsers. More
> manhours means more dollars, and that is one thing almost all managers
> understand. It is simple economics: When it becomes cheaper to support
> standards then it is to develop for a particular web browser, the standards
> will win.
You're assuming that managers are smart enough (from a technical
standpoint) to understand what techies do and logical enough to see the
correlation. My experience tells me that this is rarely the case.
> A lot of people have adopted Netscape as a champion of open source and
> standards compliance. How quickly we forget. They were the ones that
> originally perverted the HTML spec with all of the garbage we moan about
> today. Netscape would have loved to be the next Microsoft, but they couldn't
> pull it off. AOL is still trying -- and so far, they are doing pretty good.
> The only good solution for *us*, the people who have to work with the
> software, is standards compliance and open source software.
I can agree with that.
--
Derek Martin
System Administrator
Mission Critical Linux
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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