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At 01:14 PM 6/10/2002 -0600, Aaron Skonnard wrote:
> > I have a hard time seeing the rise of the vendor-dominated Web as
> > inevitable, which makes me pretty much giggle at this:
> >
> > >I completely agree. It was the *vendors* that made it happen. And
>it's
> > >the vendors that will make it happen with Web services. The W3C and
>WS-I
> > >are trying to steer but maybe we're not all on the same ship.
> >
> > Not that vendors didn't have a role, but I hardly think it's
>reasonable to
> > argue that vendors made it happen or that their role was necessarily
> > positive.
>
>Don't read too much into "made it happen". I was using Champion's term
>from the previous email. More precisely: the Web didn't fully penetrate
>society until the major vendors got behind it.
I'll start with agreement, as this statement is much more reasonable than
what I thought you were saying. It's interesting to remember Microsoft's
alarm klaxons going off and the early rise of the Web before Netscape even
got in the picture, but I can't claim my parents were using the Web until
after those folks had showed up.
> > HTTP 0.9 _was_ trivial to implement, and the early HTML work wasn't
> > exactly
> > rocket science. There was a really diverse set of browser choices in
>the
> > mid-90s before the big vendors went to war and ensured that no one
>else
> > could afford to compete in the field.
>
>So it was the vendors that made the specs too hard to implement and not
>the developer community craving more functionality? Thinking back, I
>couldn't wait to get my hands on DHTML, scripting, events, etc...
Actually, I don't have a hard time arguing that case, since the vendors
pretty well leapt ahead of the standards without too much fondness for ease
of implementation. Microsoft used to complain about Netscape's JavaScript
implementation, and Mozilla and Opera folks have complained plenty about
Microsoft's CSS implementation. Beyond that, I can't say I'm particularly
impressed about the W3C's general attitude (especially with regard to W3C
XML Schema) toward ease of implementation as a criteria for excellence.
I was excited about DHTML too. So excited that I wrote a book (my first)
on it. I'm amazed sometimes that I continued to write after the
vendor-driven misery of doing it.
Simon St.Laurent
"Every day in every way I'm getting better and better." - Emile Coue
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