Hello, David Baron has written an essay titled "Fragmentation of document formats on the Web" that discusses the ongoing balkanization of the rich internet and suggests a way out by keeping it simple, stupid.
David concludes: These threats to interoperability threaten to fragment the Web, especially between desktop clients and small devices. While a combination of carefully designed documents and carefully designed profiles may allow graceful degradation in the absence of interoperability, past experience with HTML on the Web has shown that this is unlikely to happen. Why is fragmentation bad? It reduces the amount of Web content available to any user, since it requires that authors produce content for all fragments of the Web, which most authors will not do. The W3C and its leaders have taken a strong position against fragmentation in the W3C's basic principles and in Tim Berners-Lee's opposition to the .mobi TLD proposal. While it is in the financial interests of the W3C to work on whatever standards interest its members, it is not in the best interests of the Web. That is not an inherent conflict as long as the W3C makes it clear which standards (and profiles) are intended for use on the Web. If the W3C does not act, the problem will have to be solved either by some other standardization body or by the market. While solution by the market may not sound inherently bad, it is worth remembering that the rules for error-handling in traditional HTML were solved by the market, and the end result was bad for competition and bad for small devices. Full story @ http://dbaron.org/www/df-frag What's your take on it? Do you think a browser supporting all W3C document standards (HTML, XHTML, CSS, SVG, XForms, XSLT, etc.) and all of their requirements (XML, XML namespaces, XPath, XML Schema, XML Events, XLink, etc.) will ever get build before the end of the century? - Gerald ------------------- Gerald Bauer All Things XAML Group | http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xaml-talk MyXAML Developers Group | http://groups.yahoo.com/group/myxaml ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email sponsored by Black Hat Briefings & Training. Attend Black Hat Briefings & Training, Las Vegas July 24-29 - digital self defense, top technical experts, no vendor pitches, unmatched networking opportunities. Visit www.blackhat.com _______________________________________________ xul-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/xul-talk
