[whatwg] <output> and onforminput

[Jim Ley]

On Tue, 22 Jun 2004 01:14:03 +0100, James Graham <jg307 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> Lachlan Hunt wrote:
> > Ian Hickson wrote:
> >  Why should it matter that
> > Internet Explorer has a large market share?
> 
> Because web authors will not build sites that don't work for 9/10 of
> their visitors. 

The WHATWG website claims that the spec is backwards compatible, which
means it'll work on all UA's no need to special case IE, of course
it's looking increasingly like that is marketing speak, and the actual
intention is to obsolete the commercial browsers still in the
marketplace to drive sales of the Opera client.

> The idea is that they don't need to be because it will be possible to
> use the mechanisms available for extending Internet Explorer (e.g. HTCs)
> to implement (much of) the spec without the aid of Microsoft.

Script HTC's cannot be used in a commercial environment, they're
simply inadequate to the task and full of memory leaks and various
other problems, any time you pay for MS support, they'll tell you to
stop using them.   Binary Behaviours or extending the browser is of
course possible, but who's going to install those?    I really don't
see the IE6 support path here.

> "Hi, Microsoft, we're a consortium of your competitors and we'd really,
> really like it if you supported more web  standards so more people could
> switch to our products more easilly".

Which is obviously much worse than "Hi, Customers, we're going to make
our own browsers obsolete so you'll have to buy new ones, but it's
okay, we'll still support the browsers made by our competitors."

> I would be a lot more convinced by your arguments if you could
> demonstrate that there is any significant mobility toward XHTML.

Tantek Celik recently told me that all the website creation folk in
the US were using XHTML, now I found that difficult to believe, but I
expect he's more likely to have accurate figures than me for that
area.

> You also seem to believe that everything the W3C does is automatically
> good and useful.

Oh no, that's far from true, but at least they have a process, it may
often fail, and certain members don't feel constrained by it, but at
least it exists, and isn't controlled by 2 browser vendors like this
WHATWG.

Jim.