Re: Intranet pages

On Wed, 5 Aug 2009, Julian Reschke wrote:
> Ian Hickson wrote:
> > >
> > > Incorrect again. The vendors of these systems have little control 
> > > about the UA vendor's bug fixing (I'm talking from experience here).
> > 
> > The UA isn't necessarily the one that gets fixed.
> 
> Right, most of the time it doesn't, although it should.

My interest isn't in assigning responsibility. I'm just talking about what 
actually happens.


> You're probably trying to point out that frequently the problem is not 
> in the UA, but in the pages being produced. That's of course true.

Exactly who is actually to blame doesn't much matter to me.


> Our perspectives are different, because in the past I had to deal with 
> broken UAs that didn't process my pages correctly, while you had to deal 
> with broken pages not "working" in particular browsers.

On the open Web both exist, and UAs whichever comes last ends up being the 
one that has to be compatible with whichever came first. In a walled 
garden environment, it's whoever has the contract with the garden's owner 
who ends up having to fix it. These are fundamentally different models, 
and that kind of difference is why I do not believe it makes sense to use 
the same technology development model for both walled-garden technologies 
and open Web technologies.

Again, however, this doesn't mean we shouldn't consider walled-garden 
situations, or that we should go out of our way to prevent open Web 
technologies from being used in intranets. As I said in my original e-mail 
on this thread:

> [...] If we can make a technology that happens to displace proprietary 
> alternatives in walled gardens, that's a bonus. It's not a goal, 
> however. If it _was_ a goal, we'd be woefully underprepared to address 
> it. Indeed our entire approach would probably have to be rethought. It 
> would also mean we probably couldn't suitable address the open Web use 
> cases; the two are, in many cases, incompatible in pretty fundamental 
> ways.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Wednesday, 5 August 2009 10:31:01 UTC