Stephen Moehle wrote:
> I think some of your examples actually tend to make Philip's point:
> My 56k modem can still talk to a 2400 baud modem
> IPv6 and IPv4 can coexist
> Existing B&W TVs could recieve color signals when color TV was
> introduced and color TVs could recieve B&W signals.
> The introduction of touch-tone phones did not require everyone to throw
> out existing rotary-dial phones.
> NN6 and Mozilla cannot handle HTML designed for earlier versions of the
> browser.
>
> Unlike many standards, there is no backwards compatibility here. And
> layers is a standard. It may not be a W3C sanctioned standard, but it
> is Netsape's standard. They convinced a lot of people to use it, and
> now all those people who were suckered into using it are accused of
> being two-faced and are being told to f*** off.
"Netscape standard" is meaningless. If Sony had come up with their own
way of doing HDTV ten years ago, and it failed to catch on, I certainly
wouldn't blame them for dropping support of the proprietary junk in
favor of real HDTV support.
Yeah, maybe Netscape suckered alot of people into doing stuff the wrong
way once. It was still their choice to do so. Some of us never jumped
on that bandwagon and eschewed the proprietary stuff. Guess what?
We're still doing just fine, without the hassles.
> I think it is true that everyone only wants to write something once. No
> one wants to have to write it for every browser in existence which is
> why standards are good. At the same time, no one wants to rewrite
> everything because someone decided to change the rules, which is why
> backwards compatibility is good.
HTML has generally been designed with forward and backward compatibility
in mind. If a vendor chose to include an extension, that clearly lies
outside the standard. It's always been clear that using extensions was
at your own risk.
--
Tim Larson - web programming guru
Red 5 Interactive, Inc. - www.r5i.com
4549 Fleur Dr. Des Moines, IA 50321
