Standards - was getting OT Re: [WebAIM] More data ...

On Tue, 21 Nov 2006 16:49:43 +0100, Accessys@smart.net  
<accessys@smart.net> wrote:

> On Tue, 21 Nov 2006, John Foliot - WATS.ca wrote:

>> David Woolley wrote:
>> >
>> > 3.  I would result in uniform behaviour (for a single browser) across
>> >     sites, which would be rejected by designers because it frustrated
>> >     branding.

> probably would work but how would you get the various competing browser
> makers to agree to anything.

Since that is what my job is all about, I can imagine various ways we do  
it. Having sat down with the developers of Safari, Internet Explorer, AOL,  
and a few others over the last few days, (Mozilla were off having a party  
while ther rest of us worked together), and having sent people to meet  
browser makers and sit down together to make things work every month for  
the last year, I think it is not as hard as you might think.

Of course it takes time to go from agreeing on an idea to getting working  
and compatible implementations in the hands of users, but it happens.  
Otherwise we would not have the means to carry on this particular  
discussion.

> technically it would probably not be that hard.
> politically it won't ever happen.

Funnily enough, things that seem technically not that hard often turn out  
to be a lot more complicated. The politics is not (always) meaningless  
(just ask people who write japanese or arabic what they think of ascii or  
latin-1 as a standard character set for the internet) but it does take  
further time. Sometimes, to get things right.

Cheers

Chaals

-- 
   Charles McCathieNevile, Opera Software: Standards Group
   hablo español  -  je parle français  -  jeg lærer norsk
chaals@opera.com          Try Opera 9 now! http://opera.com

Received on Tuesday, 21 November 2006 16:06:57 UTC