RE: [xml-dev] Microsoft's deeply cynical appealto"standards compliance"

[Joshua Allen <joshuaa@microsoft.com>]

> One little hiccup in their SOAP support by a stupid marketing manager and
> the rest of us are out of business.

This is a really important point.  This is a good example of why people like Tim Bray insist "if it's not well-formed, it's crap".  The more that a specification leaves things open to interpretation and variance, the more likely it is that the "real" standard ends up being whichever implementation gets most market share.  When interop means "works with most of the big guys" and not "works with the spec", then the spec is severely weakened.

XML and SOAP were both designed with the benefit of hindsight into HTML and CSS failings.  Hopefully there is less room for similar breakage to happen in an XML and web-services world.  I'm not naïve enough to think similar breakages will never happen, but at least the newer specs put independent developers on better footing than the previous mess did.

P.S. It's not only "the rest of us" -- I just found that IE on PocketPC is being blocked as well.

P.P.S Congrats on the "Wired" award, Dave!