[Sigia-l] MS, Scripting and Standards Compliance (and Food)

[Alfonso Corretti]

On Thu, 2004-02-19 at 15:29, H Taylor wrote:
> > If you were referring to implementation problems (deriving those to
> > cross-platforms problems), that could be due to the lack of standard
> > specifications about DOM, and I've said W3C has already developed it, so
> > MS can now do their job in the correct way.
> 
> Are we to believe, then, that for all these years, Microsoft has really been
> *trying* to be standards-compliant, and just occasionally goes awry only
> because standards don't exist or are poorly defined?

Nice question :-)

I wouldn't play devil's advocate, but if you take a look to the WWW
Consortium's specification for the X-HTML [1] you will see a list of
acknowledgments including employees from Microsoft. As from Sony
Ericsson, SAP, Oracle, Panasonic... So standards are really developed by
the same people who harms them.

And if this happens is because of a standard's lack where the added
functionality successes (from the user's p.o.v.), so the way to solve
this is to satisfy both the user and the industry needs. And when this
happens successfully, the adoption from the industry, so from Microsoft,
is unavoidable (think on CSS, on DOM, on XML, on XHTML, on JPEG, on
PNG...)

Of course, there are particular issues. I'm thinking on GIF (patented by
Unisys until June 2003), on Flash's success (due in part to the failure
of SMIL), on FrontPage (the poorest html generator I've ever seen -both
syntactically and semantically-) and many more that would need another
message as long as this one for each case.

[1] W3C X-HTML Specification 
    - http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#acks

> Are you familiar with the term "embrace and extend"? Have you thought about
> what is implicit in these helpful efforts to give their customers a little
> something extra, and how it might just coincidentally benefit their business
> model to deviate a bit from standards?

If MS treats communications as a marketing tool, and of course they
do/did, they will always deviate from all development ethics. But we
can't forget that inside MS, behind the BIG BIG marketing department,
there are a few developers that possibly share the same point of view as
Tim Berners Lee. Maybe there's is a constant internal fight between
marketeers and developers. Who knows? :-)


> I apologize for straying off topic, but since I'm already way out there,
> I'll back up Christina's assertion about London's reputation as a food mecca
> (with the minor caveat that this does not represent a triumph for
> traditional British food, but another scene altogether).

I haven't followed that thread, but I need to say that if you really
want to discover great food, you should come to Catalunya (a Spanish
region) to taste the golden and tasty olive oil, the delicious wines,
the great recipes for fish, meat, and even snails (you should just taste
them!) that our country has :-)

Cheers! Or bon appetite ;-)

-- 
Alfonso Corretti <alfonso.corretti at hispalinux.es>
HISPALiNUX - Asociación Española de Usuarios de GNU/Linux