Re: Comprehensive Summary of the Issues?

On Sábado, Ago 30, 2003, at 17:53 Europe/Lisbon, Scott Cadillac wrote:

>
> Interesting musings Rui,

Thanks, but my musings are not the point here. It's just a collection 
of links I found while analysing the issues and a first step at gauging 
the impact on web designers, usability, and standartization.

> Please express yourself, but don't call this a comprehensive summary 
> while
> editorializing your opinion at the same time.

I was not (at all) referring to my musings as a comprehensive summary 
on the issues this list was created to debate. If you take the time to 
re-read my original posting, you will see that they are only what lack 
of information (most notably the lack of the aforesaid summary) led me 
to reflect on.

Allow me also to make clear that I'm not an editor of anything, merely 
someone trying to figure out what the actual situation is and coming up 
blank, because:

1) It is not clear whether the court ruling has impact on ActiveX, the 
(originally Netscape, I think) plugin architecture (and hence Flash) or 
applets.
2) We do not know the alternatives Microsoft presented to the W3C (and 
are hence unable to gauge the impact of any of them)
3) We have yet to find a statement from Eolas where it is clear whether 
they will (or won't) consider suing any other browser developers (which 
might affect Mozilla, Safari, Opera, etc.)

> This issue affects so many of us in so many different ways, that I 
> think the
> only way to get through this is to focus on the technical issues
> objectively.

I second that. But as someone else posted earlier, we can't focus on 
technical issues without knowing more. As far as we know, there is not 
single compilation of legal issues, technical issues, or alternatives. 
There are also very few statements on the issue (being Saturday, that's 
understandable...).

Maybe someone at the W3C (given its neutrality), could start compiling 
a FAQ on this?

> The case for standardization and conformity for public websites is one
> thing, but I'm a private Intranet developer and I'm more interested in 
> the
> impact on the business solutions I provide with MSIE.

I can understand that perfectly, but despite the (predictable) brouhaha 
from the Open Source community given this (and I quote) "blow to 
Microsoft's dominance", this does not seem to affect only MSIE. They 
were just the best target.

> Right now we are all short on technical details and some time-frame 
> for the
> changes.
>
> Thank you for your links, some of these look very interesting. 
> Cheers....

I recommend perusing the Eolas news page (people wanting to skip my 
rants can go directly to it): http://www.eolas.com/news.html - it is 
short on scope and specifics, but maybe someone can glean useful 
information from the postings (some require subscriptions to the online 
newspaper editions, which I don't have).

Regards,

Rui Carmo
http://mac.against.org

Received on Saturday, 30 August 2003 14:48:12 UTC