Hello Ben! On Wednesday, August 7, 2002 at 10:13:25 PM you wrote:
> 1) the organization responsible for the standards needs to rapidly update > them to fit with the requests of those that use them. > 2) the developers of browser software or whatever need to be committed > to obeying the standards and ONLY the standards but updating their > software regularly to ensure full compliance of the latest ones. Neither. The first presumes that the "standards" are actually *not* standards, and the org setting them just a body of people with no real job at hand. The second one presumes the "standards" are natural laws. Neither presumption is correct. It all depends on a complicated network of users, companies and site programmers choosing what they need. A good example are sites by advertising agencies using Flash excessively. The don't actually know the limitations (try a Flash navigation in which they forgot to put in a "Back" link, you can't go back with your browser button) of Flash. I've even come about a site which used the newest Flash version (6), which cannot even be installed on a Mac 8.5 system. The so-called standards are a set of recommendations - a kind of smallest subset which will work with a vision for the future. MS up to now had the possibility, by sheer marketing power, to set its own standards. But that didn't actually work as good as they thought; they brought us lots of interactive stuff that could be good (DOM). They also brought us Java code that doesn't work with the original interpreter from Sun (the infamous "Invalid bytecode" message). And the brought us ActiveX. Which isn't used widely - I've never seen or heard of a site using it. They now try to change Java as a standard for ActiveX. I am quite sure they won't succeed, people will either use older MS interpreters (from IE before 6) or Sun's engine. -- Dierk Haasis http://www.Write4U.de http://Interest.Write4U.de/pongo PGP keys available: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Subject=SendMyPGPkeys The Bat 1.61 on Windows 95 4.0 1212 C Don't judge people by their relatives. ________________________________________________________ Current version is 1.61 | "Using TBUDL" information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
