Re: Why I don't attend the weekly teleconference (Was: Input on the agenda)

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