Chuck Messenger wrote: > > Matthew Thomas wrote: > > > > DeMoN LaG wrote: >... > > > A. Microsoft is committed to implementing the Internet standards > > > that make sense to allow our customers to build great solutions. > > > As standards emerge, we evaluate them to see which standards might > > > best serve our customers' needs. >... > > The alternative would be wasting time implementing stuff that their > > customers *don't* want. In this case (though not in all cases) that > > wouldn't make them any money, so there wouldn't be any point. > > I think it's more like, they want to lock in their users with > proprietary formats.
It would make financial sense for them to do this, and I'm expecting it to happen eventually, but I haven't seen any evidence of it yet. `Proprietary formats' aren't inherently evil. Where Microsoft's customers are asking for something that's not currently covered by a standard, they have no choice *but* to implement it in a proprietary way rather than twiddling their thumbs waiting for the relevant W3C working group to come up with something. Examples include IFRAME (MSIE 3.0), behaviors (4.0), and overflow ellipses (6.0), all of which are undoubtedly useful. However, in each case, they've submitted the new feature to the W3C for inclusion in the next version of the relevant standard. That only causes lock-in for as long as it takes competing browsers to get around to implementing it. Netscape did the same thing in the 1.0 to 4.0 era, with FONT, BLINK, FRAMESET, MULTICOL, and so on. Perhaps the only reason they haven't done it since 4.0 is that they've been too busy playing catch-up -- first trying to implement new features in a rendering engine that allegedly wasn't capable of it, and then writing a new rendering engine from scratch. > Supporting open standards works against that > goal. If there's such a groundswell that they're _forced_ to, only > then will they support open standards. Um, duh, that's what `implementing the Internet standards that make sense to allow our customers to build great solutions' *means*. If their customers start a groundswell, saying `hey, we want full CSS2 support to build great solutions', Microsoft will implement it. Supply and demand, y'know. There is no financial benefit for them to implement something if nobody wants it. (Note that `somebody' might be another group within Microsoft.) > Even then, they'll try to > corrupt the open standards, with proprietary extensions. >... Do you have any examples, or are you just trolling? (Kerberos doesn't count; this is the Web we're talking about.) -- Matthew `mpt' Thomas, Mozilla UI Design component default assignee thing <http://mozilla.org/>
