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1/18/2002 4:50:36 PM, "Joshua Allen" <joshuaa@microsoft.com> wrote:
> In fact, you would agree that interoperability *is* in Microsoft's
> best self-interest in most cases.
Absolutely; the network effect makes it in EVERYONE's best interest
to interoperate cleanly. By the same token, standards support says
nothing about a vendor's trustworthiness, just its self-interest.
> There are obviously issues of contention that have been argued to
> death (Samba, "Halloween", Kerberos).
You forgot to mention the little flap about MSN locking out Opera
users; that was not a classic "trust building exercise" :~)
> I know it is easy to find anti-Microsoft
> advocacy sites that take the position you mentioned,
> but I think it is incorrect to say that this
> perception matches the experience of most
> developers.
My personal experience (most particularly in the XML and HTML arena)
is that it is possible but quite tedious to get real interoperability
between MS and other tools. I would be astonished if very many
experienced people disagree. As far as I know, this is also true
with Word's HTML output, Kerberos, ODBC, Samba, SQL, Java, and many
other areas as well.
I'm sorry this thread even tangentially led to the pointless, eternal
"MS is evil" flame war; we're just as sick of it outside Redmond as
you folks must be. No vendor is without sin here; EVERYONE embraces
and extends this stuff to some extent; there's really no choice since
the standards are not complete and mature enough to do otherwise.
The issues here aren't with XML 1.0 so much as with DOM, XSLT, SVG,
CSS, etc. I'm saying "just make SURE that the complex stuff those
wizards and GUIs generate truly interoperate," don't take the
vendor's word for it. "We make it easy" is the first step down the
road to interoperability Hell. Is that really so unfair, to MS or
anyone else?
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