In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Matthew Thomas wrote: > > overflow ellipses (6.0), ...which are > undoubtedly useful.
No offense, but was there too much rum in your fruitcake or something? I honestly don't see what purpose overflow ellipses serve, except perhaps to conceal a bug (or more charitably, a widespread misuse) of overflowing. To return to your more general point, "Why would Microsoft implement a feature if their customers didn't want it?", I can think of several reasons. 1) To conceal a misfeature. (One possible interpretation of the above, although I could certainly be wrong.) 2) Arrogance. If you assume that MS employees are basically well-meaning, goodhearted people who happen to believe that they and their co-workers are smarter than anyone else in the industry, it explains a great deal of what they do. 3) Strategy. If a feature helps leverage their dominance of the browser market to dominating another area, they're quire likely to implement it. > 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. Assuming the W3C finds it worthy. Submission != acceptance. > 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. Perhaps. OTOH, the W3C is now churning out recommendations at a ferocious clip; for the most part, the recs are ahead of browser capabilities. (The two main exceptions I can think of are XML+CSS for UI, which has been approached in rather different directions by BeCSS and XUL, and the CSSOM.) Let me also point out that the browser-introduced features you've mentioned are at best poorly designed and at worst positively harmful. The W3C is hardly a font of perfect standards, but I'd like to think that running such "features" through the standards process ultimately provides the best for consumers. For that matter, I'd hope that major alterations to a piece of Internet architecture (like adding multimedia in HTML) would be subject to relatively evenhanded peer review. (See point 2 above for why I don't consider intracorporate review acceptable for this.) >> 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.) It's hardly impossible to convince people that they want something they didn't realize existed before you told them; it's the basis for a great deal of advertising. For that matter, how did these features get into the CSS2 recommendation if no one wants them? >> 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.) > Perhaps "corrupt" is too strong a term, but the fact that they still haven't found out about the -vendor- prefix in CSS for things like filters, etc. would be a start. -- Chris Hoess
