[whatwg] Suggested changes to Web Forms 2.0, 2004-07-01 working

[Ian Hickson]

On Thu, 19 Aug 2004, Jim Ley wrote:
> On Tue, 17 Aug 2004 22:42:43 +0000 (UTC), Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> > On Mon, 19 Jul 2004, Jim Ley wrote:
> > > On Mon, 19 Jul 2004 07:54:02 +0000 (UTC), Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > It is the concensus of the members.
> > >
> > > How was this consensus reached?
> > 
> > Over a beer in a San Jose bar, if I'm not mistaken.
> 
> I thought the process was open, and the only communication method was 
> the mailing list - but we've gone over this...

Yes, we have. Given that the concensus we were talking about is regarding 
the basis of this work, it would be somewhat silly to have the forum for 
that work able change its own basis...


> > > As I've said before, I do not feel HTC's are an appropriate 
> > > mechanism for providing this sort of support in a release 
> > > environment.
> > 
> > Nobody is forcing you to use HTCs. :-) Just don't stop anyone else 
> > from using them.
> 
> I'm not, you're rejecting the built in extension mechanisms of HTML, 
> because of dubious requirements about HTC's.

HTCs and JS. And semantics. And the markup is uglier.


> > > So it's the expectation of the WHAT-WG that users of Mozilla, Safari 
> > > and Opera will get a severely degraded experience unless they 
> > > upgrade their browsers?  Well as I said before - it's one way to 
> > > drive Opera sales.
> > 
> > Oddly enough, Opera, Mozilla and Apple do not think it is unusual for 
> > them to add new features to their products and hope that existing 
> > users of previous version of those products upgrade to the new 
> > releases. In fact, when we researched this, we discovered it was 
> > standard industry practice, and a good way to stay in business.
> 
> So it is to drive Opera sales?

No, the WHATWG work is intended to provide new technologies to authors to 
have a better platform for writing Web Applications.

Opera sales are driven by better UI, user features, and marketing. Not 
standards compliance or technical features.


> > We wouldn't really have to worry about back-compat at all if it wasn't 
> > for Microsoft stalling IE development,
> 
> I got upgrades to IE just last week, I saw lots of jobs on the IE team 
> advertised last week - in fact they're recruiting more than Opera - 
> doesn't look stalled to me - so what's the point of worrying about it 
> now?

I was referring to IE's rendering engine. I see no evidence _whatsoever_ 
that Microsoft will be doing _any_ relevant improvements to their 
standards compliance in the next half-decade.

Which is what matters here.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'