[whatwg] Re: <output> and onforminput

Jim Ley writes:
>> >  Why should it matter that
>> > Internet Explorer has a large market share?
>> Because web authors will not build sites that don't work for 9/10 of
>> their visitors. 
> The WHATWG website claims that the spec is backwards compatible, which
> means it'll work on all UA's no need to special case IE, of course
> it's looking increasingly like that is marketing speak, and the actual
> intention is to obsolete the commercial browsers still in the
> marketplace to drive sales of the Opera client.

The intention is to support all legacy browsers, including things like lynx. 
Obviously, if we can provide a 'value-add' for IE specifically, that'll be 
of benefit, but IE-only-compatibility isn't something that's brought up in 
either the whatwg charter, or the Web Forms spec. 

Suggesting that we're all trying to break backwards compatibility to force 
people to adopt Opera is laughable. I use IE, Mozilla, and lynx. Why would I 
care particularly about Opera's sales? 

>> I would be a lot more convinced by your arguments if you could
>> demonstrate that there is any significant mobility toward XHTML.
> Tantek Celik recently told me that all the website creation folk in
> the US were using XHTML, now I found that difficult to believe, but I
> expect he's more likely to have accurate figures than me for that
> area.

They might be using XHTML, but it's HTML-compatible XHTML delivered as 
text/html. *No-one* is commerically delivering XHTML as 
application/xhtml+xml. IE doesn't even support it - why would anyone bother? 

>> You also seem to believe that everything the W3C does is automatically
>> good and useful.
> 
> Oh no, that's far from true, but at least they have a process, it may
> often fail, and certain members don't feel constrained by it, but at
> least it exists, and isn't controlled by 2 browser vendors like this
> WHATWG.

Erm, WHATWG has a process too. It's documented under 'Process' in the 
Charter document at http://whatwg.org/charter#process. 

How is WHATWG 'controlled by 2 browser vendors'? I'm not a browser vendor, 
except in the limited case that I sometimes contribute to Mozilla. Ditto for 
fantasai, and yourself. 

Even the 'members' of WHATWG aren't just restricted to two vendors. Let's 
see: Brendan, dbaron, and jst could reasonably be considered to be 
'Mozilla'; H?kon and Ian are 'Opera'; hyatt is 'Apple', as is Maciej, I 
think; and I don't know Dean, though I recognise his name. I suspect they'd 
all say that they're representing themselves as individuals anyway, and not 
specific companies, but even by that count, there's three, not two. 

Regards,
Malcolm

Received on Thursday, 24 June 2004 07:03:49 UTC