[whatwg] Using the HTML5 DOCTYPE as a new quirksmode switch

[Mihai Sucan]

Le Sun, 11 Mar 2007 15:35:09 +0200, Daniel Glazman  
<daniel.glazman at disruptive-innovations.com> a écrit:

> Just as a reminder, and I am an old monkey in the world of standards
> bodies, a standard body is not only a cool place where friendly geeks
> meet, drink (sometimes) free beer, and write standards for the beauty
> of standards.
>
> A standards body is a battlefield, where organizations want to push
> THEIR OWN competitive advantage, be the first one to blabla, the best
> one to blabla, where they hope to be THE solution's provider when
> multiple solutions are on the table because THEY can implement it before
> others.

I am sure of that. Everyone wants to push its own competitive advantage.  
That's good, as long as several ones "win" the battle (not only one "wins"  
everything) - otherwise we would really end having a monoculture.

> As a reminder too, the IE team went from /dev/null to A BIG TEAM.

Going from /dev/null to A BIG TEAM is sure great, but there's a bit of  
salt in that: it's disappointing the fact they had no team at all for IE.

> Last point, without IE, CSS wouldn't be what it is today. Without IE,
> many W3C standards including the DOM would not be what they are today.
> I can't count how many clever ideas Microsoft submitted to W3C WGs.

I know this piece of web browsers history.

Ironically, yes, Microsoft did push many innovative ideas into the Web,  
and then they abandoned the Web in 2001-2. Probably this is what annoys me  
most (and others as well): they abandoned the Web, leaving us with a buggy  
implementations of CSS, DOM, HTML, etc. I find it somewhat "outrageous" to  
have to spend days (and some spend nights as well) just to make a site  
work in IE - just because it has a huge market share. It is for *that*  
reason alone we are most tired of it.

And because Microsoft stopped improving IE, more and more web sites  
continued to rely on the bugs.

> Please stop seeing the Great Evil Empire or you won't be able to
> sit with them at a standardization table...

Agreed.

We will have to wait and see what the big team will do for IE.next.


-- 
http://www.robodesign.ro
ROBO Design - We bring you the future