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Why should it be ok for groups to ignore
standards but not ok for Microsoft to ignore them?
Maybe we made the rules that Microsoft plays by.
Maybe throttling the ISO efforts in favor of the
W3C and killing off good designs in favor of bad
ones has finally come home to roost in our own
backyards. Maybe. We can't say otherwise, so it
will just be more name calling, more aggressive
kicking of your competition, and a world that
cares less and less about the quality of products
and more about where they are manufactured and
who gets the money. China is going off on its
own. Do we plan to take them on over it?
We live in the hot ecotone between competition
and cooperation, innovation and standardization.
It takes intelligence to navigate among those
worlds and foresight and timing. Chrome was
already out there before XUL and XForms. The
Longhorn architecture did not spring up overnight.
MS may stick to their own knitting but they do
have a way of showing up with the complete article
ready to become productive with. Did you ever
stop to think the market may not really want a
patchwork of languages? We will find out in the
next three years.
Maybe it is time to be done with conspiracy theories.
We can work with MS or against them, but the winners
or losers will be our customers if we bet wrong.
No Plan = No Product = No Buyer = No Sale = No Pay.
len
-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Champion [mailto:mc@xegesis.org]
Sent: Wednesday, November 12, 2003 11:42 AM
To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
Subject: Re: [xml-dev] Inside Redhell: Microsoft XAML Blogger Round-Up
On Nov 12, 2003, at 11:27 AM, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
>
> 3. Standards are still valuable but we have to
> learn to listen and time their emergence. Rich
> client experimentation has gone on since at least
> the early nineties using the same family of design
> approach as has been later used in XUL and XAML.
> XUL and XAML validate that early work and among
> all of these, are confirmation of TimBL's principle
> of independent invention for it. That means it is time
> to begin or renew serious and legitimate standards
> work but with the understanding that the software
> companies will not slow down their development
> efforts.
I agree with the sentiment, but don't think it applies here. We *know*
that HTML is very limited for UI purposes, and that there is a lot of
innovation going on to fill in the gaps. That is the premise behind
XForms, XHTML 2.x, SVG (to some extent), and CSS. What strikes me is
how little Microsoft has supported these efforts in their products. An
IE 7 with XForms, SVG, and CSS compliance would alleviate a lot of
these problems, and serious MS participation in XHTML to focus that
effort on what they see as real customer needs would help too. But
there are no signs of that happening, so the protestations about how
limited the standard stuff is seem hollow.
Maybe this is all about geeks running wild and doing Cool Stuff
without regard to the network effect that drives the Internet, figuring
that the rest of the world can catch up at its own pace. The
alternative hypothesis that it is about market strategists running wild
and figuring that it's time to move to step 3 in "embrace, extend,
extinguish" can't be dismissed, however. What's more, I see virtually
no effort to offer evidence and arguments to alleviate such concerns.
> This is BrowserWarsRedux unless we
> are wise and patient and determined to do the
> right thing.
Uh, no, the browser wars are over. Microsoft won. This is the
Occupation Force specifying that the roads and bridges must be rebuilt
in a manner that accommodates their heavy equipment. <duck>
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