I agree that it is a bad idea. Determining contact info is harder than he thinks for one thing.
Adding detection code to the browser is not acceptable for many reasons. We have considered various approaches for reporting sites with problems but definitely not something like this which could be considered a DOS attack by some. The best of these approaches has been to allow people to report "bad sites" to a central location where we can collect data and then make a targeted contact to get them to change their evil ways. The best approach is to evangelize the benefits of "write once to the standards" rather than "fork, fork, everywhere a fork" for each possible browser. Education combined with realistic market pressure is the key to changing the web landscape from "best view with...". This has been difficult considering our relative market share but will hopefully improve in the future as more gecko based users appear in logs. That will get their attention more than any spam campaign. Then our message should be "do not try to support all browsers equally. If you must support older generation 3 and 4 browsers, give them simple markup, but provide modern browsers with a single standards based content". Our message will be received well if we can show the decrease in maintenance and increased ease of development for standards based content. We can not coerce people into supporting the standards. We must lead them to the path. mi dos pesos. =bc Brendan Eich wrote: > rms wrote with this idea, and said it was ok to pass along. I am > arguing with him that spamming webmasters about IE-only features > actually *could* make things worse -- it could annoy them into moving > from a position of ignorance (I didn't know I was using something that > isn't standard -- I'll fix it, thanks) to intention (screw you for > spamming me, I'm never gonna change -- IE forever!). Thoughts? > > /be > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > Subject: > Discouraging IE-only features > From: > Richard Stallman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Date: > Tue, 2 Apr 2002 11:27:20 -0700 (MST) > To: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > I am told there are many sites that only work with IE. I am trying to > think of ways to do more to discourage that, and it occurs to me that > Mozilla could help organize the effort in a very efficient way. > > What would you think of adding an automatic feature to send a > complaint message when certain features are encountered? > > Personalizing the messages would make the campaign more effective. My > idea is that the message template would be stored in a file in the > user's home dir so that the user could change it at any time. The > first time a user sends such a message, the user would be invited to > personalize the template right then and there. > > If there are several features that cause such trouble, you could > arrange to insert specific brief explanations of the troublesome > features found in that page. The template could include a magic > cookie such as $$ that means "insert the explanations here". > > There may not be an automatic way to determine where to write to, but > perhaps you could figure it out using heuristics based on searching > the site for Mailto links plus info from DNS. You might also be able > to maintain a database of addresses to write to for various sites. > > What do you think? I think that over a period of a couple of years > this might generate substantial pressure on sites to stay away from > nonstandard features. >
