RE: Bad News on IE6 XML Support

[Michael Rys <mrys@microsoft.com>]

Eric, the excerpt below is what our XML teams are planning on doing
(look at MSXML and the System.XML support). IE team members (I think)
are not even reading this list. 

However, data outlives code, so once you allow people to store data in a
certain form, you simply cannot disallow them. Warning is an option, and
providing transition periods (that can range several years/decades).
This does not move in internet time, I am afraid...

Best regards
Michael

PS: As to the embrace and extend arguments. I give you two replies.
Choose the one that Occam's razor would suggest:

1. MS intentionally screwed the XML parser up as an evil plot to embrace
and extend and rule the world (insert evil laughter).
2. MS engineers did not read the XML recommendation as careful as they
should have and made mistakes that are now hard to fix and take time...

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Eric Bohlman [mailto:ebohlman@earthlink.net] 
> Sent: Sunday, September 09, 2001 3:59 PM
> To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Subject: Re: Bad News on IE6 XML Support
> 
> 
> 9/9/01 2:28:48 AM, Rick Jelliffe <ricko@allette.com.au> wrote:
> 
> >No,  they chose to penalize everyone else's XML systems. If that IE 
> >parser accepts something and Oracle's correctly finds the error, are 
> >the punters supposed to know that MS messed up and Oracle is 
> correct? 
> >(Or any other example, such as Sun's parser etc.)  Why isn't 
> this just 
> >"embrace and extend", which the rest of us are sick of.
> 
<snip/>
> 
> At the same time, I *can* understand Microsoft's concern that 
> they not just abruptly break something  
> that to their customers appears to be "working."  Maybe the 
> solution is for them to offer a time- limited 
> "bug-compatibility patch" that would extend the "tolerant" 
> behavior long enough, and only 
> long enough, for everybody to fix their broken systems.  
> Customers would have to do something 
> explicit to activate the patch, and the activation process 
> would have to warn them that they could 
> *not* count on this behavior in the future.
> 
> 
> 
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