Christopher Jahn wrote: > > And it came to pass that Matthew Thomas wrote: >... > > `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. > > Which customers requested these features? > > Survey says: none.
Who were you surveying, your mouse? Unless you used to work for Microsoft Marketing, or had a mole therein, you can't possibly know how many people asked for it. All we do know is that it was enough for the Microsoft programmers to bother implementing it. > MicroSoft didn't add those items because customers specifically > asked for them; they added the features and customers integrated > them into their web pages because they were *available*. How do you know? Surely you realize that the degree to which a company does that, implementing stuff at random and dumping it on customers whether they like it or not, is inversely proportional to how successful the company is. > Had MS > pointed out that these features were not supported by other > software, we might not see them in use today. Yeah we would, they would just have been introduced by a browser vendor who would by now (probably) have more market share than either Microsoft or Netscape. > But as usual, MS added features and convinced users to become > reliant on them rather than deal with the issues that users > actually aak for. Oh, and which `issues' *do* users actually ask for? Do you really mean the features you yourself ask for? If the following paragraph is any guide, you're not very representative of the user population ... > After all, how long did it take to release a > secure and stable OS that didn't require massive patches within > a few weeks of release. > > Oh, wait - they still haven't managed that one... Microsoft went after the desktop OS market because that's where the money was. And they knew that to a very large extent, the majority of desktop customers prefer to have lots of features for little price, rather than having usability, security, or reliability. You can rant and pout about Windows' lack of security or reliability all you like (and I can rant and pout about its lack of usability), but you can't change human nature. That's why -- even before Microsoft started their illegal monopoly behavior -- desktop market share was massive for Windows, mediocre for Mac OS, and basically non-existent for OSes which concentrate on security (like the BSDs) or reliability (like Linux). People just put up with BSODs and the like, because the alternatives were (as far as they were concerned) even worse. For most people, they still are. > > 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. > > Always after the fact. You seem to be unfamiliar with the standards process. Until recently, the W3C was very odd among standards-making bodies in that it didn't require a working implementation of any proposal *before* it could be accepted as a standard. Other standards organizations (like the IETF) require this so that they can know if the proposal is even humanly implementable, let alone sensible. Though the the W3C didn't require it, many things proposed for inclusion in W3C recommendations were implemented in shipping software before being submitted. Examples include CSS1 (by Microsoft), and XBL (by the Mozilla Project). > And again, the only reason there would > be a need is because IE all ready has it, not because people are > clamoring for it. Oh, yeah, who needs CSS? Load of junk. And I'm sure Mozilla 1.0 can wait a couple of years, too, until the W3C comes up with whatever their approved version of XBL will be. (Hint: it probably won't look anything like XBL.) > > 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. > > And because they lost market share becaue web designers hated > designing TWO versions of a page. (Sound familiar?) Not really. MSIE introduced IFRAME, TABLE FRAME, and TABLE RULES, when its market share was much less than that of Netscape. All of those items are now part of HTML 4. If Web designers hated designing two versions of a page as much as you wish they did, those extensions would have harmed MSIE rather than helped it. > With > strict standards compliant, designers will only have to design a > page ONCE, Usually they still do design the page once. It's the implementation they have to do multiple times. Of course the more times they need to implement it (before their employer gets aggravated), the more money they can make. > not once for this browser, and again for that > browsers, and again for those using neither browser A or B. I know that. No, really, I do know that. <http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.webstandards.org/edu_faq.html+%22matthew+thomas%22> >... > > > 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.) > > Take a look at some of the crap FrontPage produces - lots of > incomplete or non-standard code. Oh, hardly. The main flaw in code produced by FrontPage 2.0 or FrontPage 97 is that it uses the HTML 2.0 DOCTYPE when it should be using the HTML 3.2 one. Apart from that, pages it produces are nearly valid. As for FrontPage 2000, its main problem is with attributes. It doesn't put the quotes around color attribute values; most browsers won't have a problem with this, since leaving them unquoted was *expected* in HTML 1.0. It doesn't insert ALT or TYPE attributes where it should; again, no problem for graphical browsers. And it lets you use MSIE-specific HTML extensions like BORDERCOLOR; again, no problem for any other browser, which will just ignore the unrecognized attributes. > And IE displays it all. >... That's its job. -- Matthew `mpt' Thomas, Mozilla UI Design component default assignee thing <http://mozilla.org/>
