From: "Doug Ewell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Philippe Verdy <verdy_p at wanadoo dot fr> wrote: > > It's a great news. It will force websites to stop using Microsoft > > specific features and caveats, and adopt the real standards. > > ... > > If web sites start using the real standards, people will upgrade for > > a more standard browser, and Microsoft will consider correcting > > its IE to follow the evolution of websites, removing the unnecessary > > features that Microsoft wants to promote, such as proprietary web > > fonts for CSS2, or the Office "smart links". > I'm sure it is also true, as Philippe states, that IE supports > proprietary features that aren't in the HTML specifications published by > W3C. (Netscape was famous for this in the early days with the <blink> > tag.) To the extent IE supports tags and features and behavior that are > not in the HTML DTDs, and hence are not legal HTML, one can say that IE > has not fully adopted, or is not fully conformant with, the "real > standards."
I did not spoke about Netscape or AOL that also are using proprietary or non-conforming "features". I could speak about Apple too, that also uses proprietary fonts, or incoherent decompositions of Unicode characters in its VFS driver for HFS+ filesystem. Microsoft is not alone, and my intent is not anti-someone, but I applaude when Microsoft will no longer try to impose its view (and I won't call it standard) on what a browser can or should be, because its too huge installed base of IE creates a de-facto standard that ruins the efforts done to standardize the web, and forces other browsers and web site authors to adopt its quirks just to emulate IE. The problem is that when there's a de-facto monopole with no real alternative, the existing standard gets threatened, and as long as MS does not correct its browser, no other browser will correct theirs. Then if MS corrects its browser, all web sites need to be updated to correct their content so that they display correctly (for example see the many quirks that was introduced in websites displayed with IE6, and the big difficulties encountered to support cross-browser CSS support, even between IE5.5 and IE6 which do not handle the attributes inheritance the same way. Do to this situation, websites are considered bogous instead of browsers used to visit them. I have the same bad feeling with Netscape 4.x bogous CSS support, or bogous Unicode support, something that was corrected only in the excellent Gecko engine of Mozilla and Netscape6. Conformance to an existing standard and anticipation to its evolution or corrections is something that developers of browsers should consider as bugs in their browsers, instead of in web sites, simply because it is much more complicate for content authors to have to test and patch their content face to bugs or quirks in some browsers. The basic requirement is that the documents displayed must be rendered at least correctly,even if the exact layout is not supported because of font differences. This requires that browsers correctly interpret at least any text which is correctly labeled and encoded, and then any correct markup (some of which should be ignored but should not forbid the rest of the markup to be rendered correctly.) > I guess my problem is that Philippe makes it sound as though IE doesn't > support HTML at all, but rather some proprietary HTML-like > Microsoft-specific markup language; That's an excessive interpolation. Don't assume things I did not say. In fact I admit that it's difficult to implement a standard, but this should be done by coherent steps, so that conformance to a given version is required before trying to implement and interpret the next level of the standard. The proprietary aspect of browsers is the fact that they often do not follow an evolution that respects strictly the path indicated in conformance requirements of the standards they wish to support. This situation will continue for several years until there's a real conforming XML-DOM engine that passes the conformance levels needed to parse contents without introducing "quirks", that browsers often want to maintain instead of correcting them. This was true for Netscape4.x, and it is still true for IE, and for other browsers like Opera that want to emulate IE, or for AOL's proprietary "features" that were added to IE on Windows, and that will now be added on top of Safari or Netscape on Mac OS; on the opposite, the Mozilla's Gecko engine is built considering that any deviance is not a quirk to support but a bug that needs to be corrected. We know what this means now for AOL: it looses customers because it maintains its proprietary features in its mandatory connection software. This is true also for cable access providers (which were often in situation of monopole for the cable access until DSL started to explode and threaten their monopole: they have started to remove their exclusive alliance as AOL distributors, offering alternative with their own connection kit and support, with total freedom of choice of the browser, and of the connection hardware, that can use the same set of software and hardware add-ons that work now with DSL, with the only exception of the modem, that they now offer with their subscription) Thanks to the standards, they mean more customer choice, more competition, better services, and more technical alternatives for Internet access, and reduced prices on basic features. This discussion is really going too much out of topic of Unicode, even though it speaks about what standards should and should not be: a standard is not the adoption of a technology supported by a unique vendor, even if it's in a near monopole situation. All monopoles need (and should) be complemented by alternative technologies without impacting heavy costs for those that wish to make this step. Open standards are there to ease and accelerate the adoption of newer technologies with lower development costs and better ROI, not to create new constraints.
