Re: CSS is doomed (10 years per version ?!?)

Orion Adrian wrote:

>This is where trust comes in. It really is all about trust. You don't
>trust them and I trust them, but why that is is depedant on the
>interactions we've both had with the company.
>
I trust for Microsoft to not re-invent the wheel, and stick to the 
standards. You claiming that you wouldn’t mind for Microsoft to develop 
competing proprietary technologies makes me feel uneasy.

Also, not everything Microsoft does is automatically good, or working 
well. XAML for example is a great way to develop desktop applications 
and a big improvement from how it works now, but for use on the web it 
lacks severely.

I think you’re greatly overexaggerating things. There are *many* things 
in CSS that are a Candidate Recommendation already, but have not been 
implemented yet in most browsers. Look at the completed CSS3 modules, 
and even parts of CSS 2.1. It’s not as if browser development will be on 
a standstill while the CSS3 specification is being developed further in 
the coming two or three years.

And it is not different for proprietary technologies. They also take a 
long time to be specified, receive input from various internal working 
groups, e.g. for localisation. Look at XAML, it’s taking a lot of time 
for it to be developed, and I can assure you that isn’t all pure coding 
time.

Proprietary technologies also don’t have a functional implementation any 
sooner than standards have. Decent CSS3 support will also be in a single 
browser (e.g. Mozilla?) sooner than in 5 years. However, fortunately the 
browser market isn’t monopolised anymore, and there are competitors as 
well, and for a technology to be usable on the web, it needs to be 
supported by a sufficient number of user agents and the broad majority 
of users.

So the only difference really is: it is proprietary. With all the 
disadvantages that carries.

Microsoft creating a proprietary alternative to CSS would absolutely not 
improve my confidence in the company. Microsoft making sure that they 
have a decent implementation of CSS3 by the time the specification gets 
finalised will.

If Microsoft wants to add things to the standards, they can make 
proposals to the W3C through their working group members, and in the 
meantime implement those additions to CSS with an -ie- prefix, just like 
Mozilla and all the other browser vendors are doing.

So I hope you can see the truths I speak, and from now on don’t defend 
proprietary technologies that compete with public standards :).


~Grauw

-- 
Ushiko-san! Kimi wa doushite, Ushiko-san!!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Laurens Holst, student, university of Utrecht, the Netherlands.
Website: www.grauw.nl. Backbase employee; www.backbase.com.

Received on Friday, 1 July 2005 14:04:15 UTC