- From: Chris Wilson <Chris.Wilson@microsoft.com>
- Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2007 10:01:52 -0700
- To: Dannii <curiousdannii@gmail.com>
- CC: "public-html@w3.org WG" <public-html@w3.org>
Dannii [mailto:curiousdannii@gmail.com] wrote: >Would Microsoft really freeze development, regardless of whatever bugs >may still exist, once a certain percentage of the web uses it? "Freeze development" is not quite how I would put it. "Freeze behavior" is what I would say, and yes. We will always make security and crashing-bug fixes in our code, at least within the limits of our maintenance contract (7 years from release, I believe, is the brief semi-accurate version). Once a mode becomes significantly popular, we can't make big changes to already-existing behavior. Today, many of the changes we need to make are big, and cause compatibility problems. (I'll refer to the IE7 example of "we started following how CSS says overflow is supposed to work, and loads of sites started overlapping text".) We've already frozen behavior in quirks mode, as have other browsers. The mistake we made in IE7 was that "standards mode" was already popular and depended, for us, on IE's incorrect behavior. -Chris
Received on Wednesday, 18 April 2007 17:02:04 UTC