[whatwg] Re: Rendering Unknown Elements and IE Support

[Asbjørn Ulsberg]

On Mon, 05 Jul 2004 00:09:52 +0100, Dean Edwards <dean at edwards.name> wrote:

> if we speculate that microsoft will "spoil" whatever IE implementation  
> we provide then we may as well not bother. to withdraw support for HTCs  
> would be a major climbdown. it would also annoy some large corporations  
> who have deployed them on their corporate intranets.

Microsoft takest most of its decisions based on an economic evaluation.  
Microsoft makes no money from Internet Explorer itself, but from having  
loyal customers who buys support and other products from them. HTC is  
currently a pretty widely adopted technology, although not as widespread  
as plain IE-proprietary JavaScript.

It would be a major step for Microsoft to cut HTC support in IE, and it  
would lead to a lot of angry, dissatisfied and in the end disloyal  
customers, which again would lead to an economic loss for Microsoft. I  
can't see one good reason whatsoever for Microsoft dropping HTC support in  
IE -- there's nothing but loss «gained» from this for their part.

> there is a fallback position in light of such a catastrophe.  
> implementing WF2 functionality using javascript alone would provide an  
> acceptable level of client-side support for this platform.

Isn't JavaScript a good enough way to implement WF2 functionality anyhoo?  
HTC's are a bit more powerful and better «componentized», but JavaScript  
is at least a standard way of doing stuff, and would be possible to get  
running in other browsers as well; e.g. Netscape 4.x. A lot could be  
accomplished by using standard ECMA 262 script and the W3C DOM, and if you  
ask me, the best solution to a task is most always to go with a standard  
and not a proprietary solution.

Just my ¢10.

-- 
Asbjørn Ulsberg         -=|=-        asbjornu at hotmail.com
«He's a loathsome offensive brute, yet I can't look away»