- From: Brendan Eich <brendan@mozilla.org>
- Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2009 07:56:14 -0800
- To: "Anne van Kesteren" <annevk@opera.com>
- Cc: "James Graham" <jgraham@opera.com>, "Mark S. Miller" <erights@google.com>, public-script-coord@w3.org
On Nov 16, 2009, at 7:51 AM, Anne van Kesteren wrote: > On Mon, 16 Nov 2009 16:27:14 +0100, Brendan Eich > <brendan@mozilla.org> wrote: >> Mozilla turns some bugs into Technology Evangelism bugs instead of >> slavishly implementing every IE-compatible mistake we can find. Or Netscape-compatible, which means my fault for JS junk, so I'm not lamenting mistakes per se (well, apart from mine). Rather the trailing- edge focus plus over-specification. >> Yes, this is imperfect and we are obviously also guilty of >> following extant content instead of leading it. But too much >> following, and too much over-specifying, and you will paint >> yourself into a corner. >> >> The opportunity cost (that you spend time on trailing edge stuff >> instead of better leading edge work) is very high too. > > Opera has similar evangelism efforts and I'm sure other browser > teams do too (at the very least Microsoft does). At some point you > just reach the point where spending some time on defining trailing > edge stuff outweighs the cost of trying to evangelize each site that > uses it. At some point *you* do. So do we, but less so since gaining more market share starting with Firefox 1 in 2004. Back in 2001 we would either do what we had to, or wave the standards flag and hang tough at small-percentage market share numbers. Market dynamics and content evolution mean that the trailing edge trails off -- the '90s web does not entirely render compatibly in an HTML5 UA. We should not over-bias for the past, or we will paint ourselves (slowly) into corners. /be
Received on Monday, 16 November 2009 15:57:57 UTC