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Posted by Alan J. Flavell on 04/12/06 00:33
On Tue, 11 Apr 2006, John Bokma wrote:
> "Alan J. Flavell" <flavell@physics.gla.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> > [1] not only those who purchase the most recent OS versions, I mean.
>
> For those there are plenty of alternatives.
Oh, one doesn't have to be on an *old* version of Windows to
appreciate the benefits of a real WWW browser!
> Lets also not forget that MS is one (if not the only one) that
> supports outdated OSes as long as they do. By the time Vista is
> released XP is over 5 years old.
You seem to be tacitly assuming the truth of the testimony that MSIE
is an operating system component. I would rather have a WWW browser,
leaving the OS component to be used for applying the vendor's own
fixes.
> Yes, MS did quite some things wrong, but other browsers have flaws
> too or keep flaws in existence. Ditto for the holy "standards
> organization" W3C.
Oh, sure. But deliberate violation of a mandatory requirement of an
IETF standards-track protocol (RFC2616) can hardly be laid at the door
of the W3C alone - even if the RFC in question was authored with W3C
participation.
> It's funny how a "flawed" company like MS did create a nice way to
> do things conditionally, in an early stage admitting that things
> could change drastically. IIRC, at that time CSS was draft, and
> unclear.
The CSS specification mandates clients to ignore CSS syntax which they
don't understand. But no: MSIE had to know better, and overrule that
mandatory requirement, and screw up when doing it. Things have only
changed superficially since then.
I suppose it's nice, in a perverse sort of way, that they've granted
us a non-standard feature to defeat their non-standard features. I
still prefer a specification-conforming WWW-compatible browser myself,
but as an author I need to be aware of users out there who wouldn't
recognise a specification-conforming browser if it bit them in the
bottom, sadly.
Not that the Mozilla-family, or Opera, or Lynx or whatever, are
entirely free of bugs, but at least one can have reasonable confidence
that their developers have some commitment to remedying those bugs
when they are identified, instead of (as appears to be the MS policy)
replacing known bugs with unknown bugs, and requiring those who desire
specification-conforming behaviour to research obscure workarounds.
sigh
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