xml-dev - Re: MS XML parser only works with IE...

[David Megginson <ak117@freenet.carleton.ca>]

Shibl Mourad writes:
 > Jon Bosak wrote:
 > 
 > > This is a license to repeat the browser wars of the last three years
 > > and hold users hostage to particular software packages.  
 > 
 > I know that I am going to be hated for saying this, but the browser wars
 > was a phenomenal success and prompted the development of excellent and
 > useful technology very rapidely.

Both of these statements are, to an extent, correct.  The browser wars
introduced or brought into the mainstream many interesting
innovations, but few (if any) of the good ones are a result of the
mess that both Netscape and Microsoft have both made of HTML.

Applets, real-time audio and video, virtual-reality, animations, and
other types of interaction have certainly made the web more exciting,
but why is it so difficult to find web pages that display well on my
640x480 notebook screen (and what's going to happen on even
lower-resolution TV screens)?  How many web pages could
visually-impared people usefully have their software read aloud to
them?  Why is it sometimes hard to write a web page that displays
properly in both Netscape and MSIE?

It is possible to innovate without messing around with the standards
(though, to be fair, there won't be an XML standard as such for a
couple more weeks).


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 ak117@freenet.carleton.ca
Microstar Software Ltd.         dmeggins@microstar.com
      http://home.sprynet.com/sprynet/dmeggins/

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