- From: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>
- Date: Sun, 28 Jun 2009 16:08:29 -0700
- To: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Cc: Murray Maloney <murray@muzmo.com>, public-html@w3.org
On Jun 28, 2009, at 2:01 PM, Ian Hickson wrote: > > (I personally don't think it's as dire as you seem to indicate; as > Boris > indicated, there is the opportunity to fork clients, there are > vendors who > really do care about users on the aggregate, there are vendors for > whom a > majority market share position would actually be considered a failure, > and, frankly, the users are far more able to tell what they like and > what > they don't like in their browsers than in their banks.) Besides forking completely, the availability of high quality open source engines such as Gecko and WebKit makes the barriers to entry in the browser market lower than they have ever been. Having a solid spec that enables full interoperability I should also mention that "what browsers are willing to implement" is less strong a constraint than it appears. There are very few issues where browser vendors have a strong insistence on doing things only one way. Browser vendors are also often swayed by the PR value of conforming to standards, even when the standard is in some way suboptimal. Indeed, many browser vendors feel that the success of HTML5 is important enough that the spec should often be followed for that reason alone, even when it seems to be suboptimal. In particular, when it comes to what markup is considered conforming, browser vendors tend not to have strong opinions. If anything, we tend to argue for more markup to be considered conforming. So I'd ask that the willingness (or not) of browser vendors to implement things should not be mixed up with the discussion of whether summary="" ought to be conforming. Regards, Maciej
Received on Sunday, 28 June 2009 23:09:11 UTC