Microsoft Says Standards Compliance Bad for BusinessMonday November 9th, 1998Joel Caris writes in with this link to an interesting article at The Industry Standard. Apparently Microsoft has some issues with standards compliance. Joel writes: "I must admit, Microsoft really is the king of spin. This link leads to an article from The Industry Standard about the WSP asking for full CSS-1 compliance in IE 5.0. It is mentioned how Netscape will fully support CSS-1 and CSS-2 in 5.0. Microsoft's spin on this? 'By making future version of Navigator fully compliant with CSS-1 and CSS-2, the company runs the risk of breaking pages on the Web that were created with past version of the browser,' Herman said." When you read the article, note also how Microsoft implies that Netscape is responsible for the lack of standards compliance in IE! #1 Re:Microsoft Says Standards Compliance Bad for Busby arielb Tuesday November 10th, 1998 10:21 AM Well, it does prove that there is a difference in making standards compliance _the_ feature and taking features from the w3 standards. Microsoft wants people to do web tricks but they don't believe in the principles behind open standards. Not only in that document did Microsoft think that Netscape's open source push wasn't going to hurt them, they now think they is no need for W3C standards.... gee...M$ doesn't even have 50% market share and they are already trying to make the web proprietary.. This is hilarious! It's almost on a par with Microsoft's desperate spin on the Halloween documents. Let's see what we have here: * `Microsoft is committed to having ``the leading support for Web standards,'' which is reflected in the fact that IE 4.0 and IE 5.0 support 90 percent of the CSS-1 specification, according to Joe Herman, product manager for Microsoft's platform marketing.' So, Herman seems to be trying to claim that IE5's 90-percent support for CSS1 will be `leading' over Mozilla 5's 100-percent support. Oh, sure. * `[Herman] added that CSS-1 doesn't serve its purpose when other browsers do not support it.' What? This is nuts! If this were true, then Netscape would never have bothered implementing frames, Java, or JavaScript, and MS would never have bothered implementing ... uh ... iframes, incompatible Java extensions, and VBScript :-), simply because `other browsers' did not support those things at the time. In fact, there would never have been any innovation in Web standards at all! * `By making future version of Navigator fully compliant with CSS-1 and CSS-2, the company runs the risk of breaking pages on the Web that were created with past version of the browser, Herman said.' Oh, right, so now he's saying that Netscape should continue with buggy CSS implementation, because that's what Web developers have learnt how to work around? If you did a survey of Web developers, I think you'd find them glad to pay the price of a little legacy page-breaking for the sake of a decent CSS implementation. And a final note, the article says `The beta release of Netscape Navigator 5.0 is scheduled by year's end'. Really? Why didn't we hear about this? Sorry for the long comment, but FUD like this gets on my nerves. (-: #4 Re:Microsoft Says Standards Compliance Bad for Busby Martin Nilsson Tuesday November 10th, 1998 5:13 PM Given that NTSC is among the poorest of television standards currently in use I think that the TV analogy is very appropriate. #5 Re:Microsoft Says Standards Compliance Bad for Busby Joel Caris Tuesday November 10th, 1998 5:35 PM A beta being released by the end of the year has been known for awhile--if you read enough articles. All the articles I've seen on Communicator 5.0 have said that a beta should be out by the end of the year. It was questioned when Netscape switched to NGLayout, but they still are promising the end of the year schedule. I hope they do get it out by then. Joel Caris The beta by the end of the year will be a developers preview if this means any thing... What I'm beginning to feel is that for IE5, Microsoft is actually "slacking off". 1) What do they mean they are "not sure" about 100% compliance? MS doesn't have the money all of a sudden? 2) Cnet reports no serious work on performance especially java 3) for Windows 95 they are going to remove Active Desktop. That means you have to pay for internet integration with a win98 upgrade. 4) All the cool Netscape technologies we've been hearing about (NGLayout, configurable chrome, etc) are just the beginning. I can't wait for all the goodies and ideas we'll see from other developers and academic researchers. #8 Re:Microsoft Says Standards Compliance Bad for Busby eberhard speer jr. Wednesday November 11th, 1998 8:30 AM In which w3c HTML standards am i to look for the LAYER element ? i suppose that'll be the same standard i'll find the BLINK element in. If standards are that important why send a 'proxy' to w3c to participate in the standard-making process 'on behalf of Netscape'? NGL is indeed pretty cool and let's get exited about that rather then what spin-doctors of company Y say about X and visa versa. And bear in mind that you loose ground when you sling mud. have fun ! #9 Re:Microsoft Says Standards Compliance Bad for Busby Amaury JACQUOT Thursday November 12th, 1998 11:38 AM It's not FUD, it's just plain stupidity... It seems to me that the microsoft folk hasn't even read anything on www.mozilla.org : It states in the clear there that the NGLayout library will allow rendering compatibility between itself and previous versions of the various browsers, ie4 included... <BLOCKQUOTE>If you did a survey of Web developers, I think you'd find them glad to pay the price of a little legacy page-breaking for the sake of a decent CSS implementation.</BLOCKQUOTE> Take it from this one -- we would, and gladly! But NS says #5 <B>will</B> render pages done for the #4's. |