On Thu, May 27, 1999 at 12:34:35PM -0700, Simon Cooke wrote: > So, please, don't lump us in with the Other Browser. At least we've publicly > apologized for the MARQUEE tag. Netscape haven't for BLINK, CENTER, LAYER, > etc etc etc. They have a bastardized version of java in their VM - even much > more so than MS's JVM (which is only missing RMI); at least we didn't change > the semantics of how the core packages work! They have JavaScript, which is > a bastardized version of ECMAScript that they won't fix.
Now then. You don't have to defend Microsoft against Netscape, you know - we don't blame you personally - but if you are going to then you open yourself to people sending you more complaints to answer about IE. I was going to include some quotes from a local guru (who's made significant contributions to recent releases of perl) but that would have been excessive and off-topic. Instead I'll just end by asking, when the new ISO standard character set puts the Euro sign at position A4, why did Windows go its own way and use 80, which is an unprintable control character on most systems? Not to mention all the other characters between 80 and 9F which find their way on to web pages and news articles (needless to say, most of these claim to be using the iso-8859-1 charset if they even bother to tell you[1]) and Windows software conspires to make sure the authors of these pages don't even know anything is wrong. (Not that Netscape on Windows is any different in that regard, but on Unix it displays these characters as question marks which makes the author of the page look illiterate.) imc [1]Apparently the Chinese version of Outlook Express cannot be configured to not[2] write "Joe Bloggs wrote in message" in Chinese big5 and it doesn't even mention the big5 charset anywhere in the headers. [2]Split infinitives are the in thing these days, you know.
