Sent by Dean Matsueda on 25 June 2004 21:09
> I am a designer and filmmaker and I confess to using
> nothing but mac's. No evangelism here. But this
> argument about standards is practically moot. For all
> intents and purposes, Microsoft has won the browser
> war. Microsoft has won the standards war. IE6 and
> whatever follows is the standard. Microsoft, through
> its hegemony over the desktop, saw its first and only
> real threat to be Netscape. Microsoft won. Microsoft
> sees the internet as an extension of its operating
> system, a way to make more money, and if they control
> the portal, they control all. They stopped upgrades to
> IE because they could, and only in the last week or so
> announced that they were appointing someone to restart
> the upgrade process. This is a sham and only done to
> keep mozilla and others from gaining a foothold until
> Longhorn. In Longhorn, their next version of Windows,
> there will be virtually no distinction between local
> drives and the internet. If no other browser can get
> substantially established before then, then W3C and
> any other standards body will be irrelevant. It's a
> damn shame, but those are the facts.
I agree with your points but the 'war' is not over. For one thing,
browser development has never been more vibrant, compliant to standards,
and innovative. Secondly, Longhorn isn't due out 'til *maybe* 2006 and
that does not mean that all Windows users are going to instantly upgrade
whenever it does come out. It's going to take awhile for significant
market penetration of Longhorn. Heck, MS was forced to NOT drop support
for Win98 because it still has a large user-base.
This gives standards-supporters -- Mozilla, Opera, KHTML, Apple,
OmniGroup -- a good time-frame to penetrate MSIE's dominance. I'm not
saying it's going to happen but to infer that web standards is only an
academic exercise for discussion is premature, IMHO.
What's that old Public Enemy song?... "Fight the power... fight the
power that be..."
;)
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