In article <95shih$[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, "Steve Chapel"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> "Braden McDaniel" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
> 95saus$[EMAIL PROTECTED]">news:95saus$[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
>> In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, "Mark Bitterling" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>> wrote:
>>
>> > Braden, it IS the web developers fault when they develop non-standard
>> > HTML web sites.
>>
>> Whose fault is it that those misfeatures were there to be (ab)used?
>> Blame Netscape, blame Microsoft... But the customers are just
>> capitilizing on what they've been dealt.
>>
>> Expecting people not to use features that are *there*--even if they are
>> of questionable merit--is just naive. Whether the features "should" or
>> "should not" be used is utterly irrelevant.
>
> Of course the features were put there for people to use them. It would
> be absolutely silly to add features to a product and then expect no one
> to use them!
>
> But if you do use non-standard features of a language, you're taking the
> risk that those features will not work in other versions of software.
> Another good example of a language with implementations that support
> non-standard extensions is SQL. If you're smart, you avoid the
> extensions so that your SQL has a chance of working with more than one
> DBMS.
Your analogy is flawed in that it assumes that the developers are
interested in having their output work in implementations from multiple
vendors. The Web developers who used LAYER obviously do not fall into
that category. They committed to a single vendor's implementation. Then,
that implementation changed dramatically and incompatibly from one
version to the next.
You and others on this thread keep wanting to make this about, "Well you
shouldn't use non-standard techniques, so there." Well, DUH! As I said
previously, that's *not the point.*
This is not about Web standards. This is about the responsibility of a
software developer for supporting its customers. It's also about the
responsiblity of a software developer in a position to create de facto
standards just by providing an implementation.
The Web developers you're proceeding to piss on were *just supporting
Netscape*. The existence of LAYER tags in their code is simply a result
of Netscape's inclusion of this feature.
Let me ask you: if you were a Webmaster in 1998 or 1999 and you had to
make a site with the dynamic layering capabilities of IE *and* have it
work just as well in Netscape, what would you have done?
> I'm sorry if you weren't smart enough to avoid hanging or shooting
> yourself, but it's your own fault it you weren't. You now have a choice:
> you can continue to whine, or you can learn from your mistake.
If you'd read some of my other postings, you'd know just how
ridiculously off-base this comment is. (Of course, if you'd made any
attempt to stick to the meat of the matter here rather than resort to
childish drivel, you wouldn't have included it anyway.)
Braden
