[whatwg] Re: Rendering Unknown Elements and IE Support

[Jim Ley]

On Mon, 05 Jul 2004 00:02:20 +1000, Lachlan Hunt
<lachlan.hunt at iinet.net.au> wrote:
>   I said *if* they offer a clear benefit over supporting IE. 

Sorry for misreading you!

> [script library] especially if
> they're readily available and easiy to implement.

The problem with this is that there are no good script libraries out
there, they're almost all crap, and I don't believe that even with the
talented scripters active in WHATWG that's going to change.  It seems
that many people active in the group, are more keen on the evangelism
side of getting people to move to new browsers, than to authoring good
technology.  Yes IE stopping development for 3 years or so has hurt,
but Mozilla stopping for 3 years is what let them, we need
competition, and I firmly believe this approach is actually going to
entrench IE.   We can see that the 2nd and 3rd most popular UA's on
the web don't degrade in IE (they're just embedded in it) now that
Opera/Moz/Safari are stepping up to that challenge and providing a
decent interopable plugin-api I think that provides a better chance of
moving people into the new browsers.  Rather than trying to convince
authors to break compatibility.

>   What?  Well, I'm going to interpret this question as being /why have
> an XHTML module for web apps, web forms and web controls?/, because I
> don't think we're talking about the benefits of XHTML modularization.

Er Yes, I have no problems with the idea of XHTML Modularisation being
the way to add this to XHTML, I just fail to see the benefit of
providing an XHTML version at all, IE only cares about HTML, WF2
really isn't interesting or good enough if you don't care about
backwards compatibility (we've got XForms and XBL etc.)

So I think we agree WF2 isn't really particularly useful, but if we're
going to do it, I only see the point of doing HTML (well I also agree
about the completely new language like HTML, but not XHTML).

Cheers,

Jim.